CPANTS and CPAN Testers (Was: Open/Free BSD users -- help needed to fix Test::PostgreSQL)

[Tom Hukins]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 03:08:40PM +0100, Dominic Thoreau wrote:
> Because people will insist on using these OSes, and it's worth at least
> trying to make sure your code works in as many environments as practical.
> Which is why CPANTS exists....

I hope this comes across as informative rather than picky, but I often
see people confuse CPANTS and CPAN Testers.  They're quite different.

CPANTS looks at CPAN distributions from the outside using several
heuristics to guess their quality:
http://cpants.cpanauthors.org/

CPANTS is a centralised system that runs under the complete control of
its maintainer(s).

CPAN Testers collates the test output from CPAN distributions produced
by a distributed set of volunteers who configure their systems to
submit these reports:
http://www.cpantesters.com/

If you run an unusual version of Perl, an unusual operating system or
an unusual hardware platform, it's especially helpful if you can
submit the output of any tests you run:
http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/QuickStart

Sometimes people describe CPAN Testers as a competition to see who can
submit the most test reports.  Whilst this encourages the more
prolific testers, the database also benefits from lots of people
running tests on lots of different systems.  It's worth considering
whether you want to run it on your development system or a build
machine: it's not just for high volume automated smokers.

Tom