* David Golden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-05-27 16:50]: > On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 5:52 AM, Barbie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Forcing testers to upgrade to the latest and greatest of > > everything is not going to give the tester/author an > > understanding of what the 'user' is going to experience when > > they install a distribution. > > I have to take exception to the exception. Automated smoke > testing is not the same as a installation by a user that has > human awareness and judgement. (Though perhaps I give too much > credit to users.)
This is not about users being stupid. It’s about being invisible to people who are not programmers and merely want to use a Perl application where your module is merely a prereq of a prereq of a prereq. There is no way you can teach this audience how to diagnose installation failures, and that’s as it should be since they have absolutely zero need to know anything about the CPAN ecosystem. But it’s the sort of audience that Perl needs to take on – to take a page from Schwern’s recent talk – in order to remain relevant and continue to attract mindshare. To do that, we most certainly need to know what sort of experience CPAN customers *other* than Perl programmers will have. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
