Today, I filed a bug report against CPANPLUS because it
sometimes fails to detect missing prerequisites, resulting
in bogus FAIL reports being generated against modules:
http://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=18144
Here are two examples of such failures:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/289146
http://nntp.x.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/297161
In addition to getting CPANPLUS fixed, I feel there is the
issue of what to do about such fallacious reports in the
CPAN Testers database. Currently, there is no functionality
for deleting such reports.
The best that can be done is for the module's developer to
ask the tester to redo the test and submit a newer (and
hopefully 'correct') report. My dissatisfaction with this
is that the original 'erroneous' report is still 'visible'.
If both the developer and tester agree that the original
report was 'bad', then there is no value to having it remain
visible in the system if the tester submits a
newer/corrected testing report.
As such, I would like to propose that the following
compromise be adopted: If a newer CPAN Testers report is
received that matches all of the following with respect to
an existing report:
CPAN Tester (i.e., email address)
Module
Module version
Machine architecture
Perl version
then the newer report should overwrite/mask the older
report in such a way that the older report is no longer
displayed on the module's CPAN Testers results page.
