--As of April 22, 2014 9:23:28 AM -0400, David Golden is alleged to have
said:
On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 8:03 AM, David Cantrell <da...@cantrell.org.uk>
wrote:
toolchain, including CPAN clients. Testing whether something can pass
tests on a bog-standard ancient Perl is not really useful data for
maintainers because for a long, long time, the answer to "I can't
install" is "upgrade your toolchain".
It is, however, useful for people wanting to use modules.
Not really. They can't easily differentiate between problems that
could be fixed if they upgraded their toolchain and problems inherent
to the module itself. Showing that "PASS" is possible (if only they
upgraded their toolchain) would seem to be much more useful as it
indicates that using a module is achievable.
--As for the rest, it is mine.
I saw my point as completely orthogonal to the reports, actually.
CPAN collects reports from Perl users to see if modules pass their tests -
whether those users are running the smoke toolchain is unknown. Most
probably are, but you can send in a report anytime you are using CPAN, if
you wish. I actually expect most smokers to be running a fairly recent
perl, just because it's the type of place where it's usually good to run
updates. The ancient versions of perl are probably running on secured
isolated boxes where upgrading is procedurally impossible. Either way, the
point of the reports is present a sampling of perl installs and how well
they fare with each module.
The prereqs are the lists of modules and versions the author lists as
necessary for the proper operation of the module. You can check them
against your local install however you wish - CPAN will do it for you, if
you happen to be using CPAN, but they are available for your use however
you need to use them.
Anyone can send a CPAN test report, and anyone can install a module without
CPAN. Therefore, I don't think the prereq list (for install) should take
into account the CPAN smoke test infrastructure (a subset of the CPAN
testers). Changing the CPAN Smoke Test architecture in an effort to
present a 'modern' Perl to module authors only encourages them to rely on
that modern Perl without asking for it - which will cause surprise and
problems when they don't get it for some case, for both the author and the
user of the module. We have an explicit prereq system. Use it. It will
help both author and user. *Let me see what you are relying on, don't just
expect it to be available.* That includes the toolchain: if you need a
modern toolchain, say so.
Daniel T. Staal
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