The biggest time suck in developing MakeMaker, and to a lesser extent Test::More, is running the tests. Why? Because they need to be run on lots of different platforms with lots of different versions of Perl. Currently, I do this by hand. And we all know manual testing sucks. Its time consuming and you tend to avoid it. I can't run the tests on every platform at every patch so I often wind up breaking something and not realizing it for a while.
So what I need is some way to set up a network of test servers such that I can say "test this module for me" and my testing client would ship it to as many test servers as it can find and get the results back all in just a few minutes.
How about a model that allows people to volunteer when they can (vs always). Say you have a server. You would be an author-client. You'd say I have this software that needs to be tested. The server would take it and mark it available for testing. Then test-clients could log-on (or more probably set a cron job or login script). The server would say to clients that login, "Ok, I have these jobs that need testing." The client would take any module (or might possibly have a list of preferred modules to test), test it, and send results. I'd suggest using the cpan-testers backend for this; that way, the jobs mostly done. All you have to do is write a cgi script to accept uploads from authors and give clients an appropriate link to retrieve the module for testing. Instant compiler-farm.
Randy.
