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CPANPLUS::TesterGuide - Becoming a CPAN Tester with CPANPLUS |
CPANPLUS::TesterGuide - Becoming a CPAN Tester with CPANPLUS
# This is an article, not a module.
The following article first appeared in perl.com, and is copyrighted 2002 by Autrijus Tang. This document may be distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.
In CPANPLUS -- Like CPAN.pm only better? [1], Jos Boumans recounted the tale of how his CPANPLUS project came to be; one of the original goals was to provide a modular backend to CPANTS, the CPAN Testing Service, so modules can be automatically built and tested on multiple platforms.
Although the initial CPANPLUS release did not support testing-related features, Jos considered them important enough to be listed near the top of his Current and Future Developments wish list, and quoted Michael Schwern's opinion on their potential benefits [2]:
It would alter the way free software is distributed. It would get a mark of quality; it would be tested and reviewed. And gosh darnit, it would be good.
At that time, despite having participated in CPANPLUS's development for more than four months, I was blissfully unaware of the project's original vision. But it seemed like a worthwhile goal to pursue, so I quickly jotted down several pieces that need to work together:
make test results to the author, and make them available
for other users to check.
Today, with the 0.032 release of CPANPLUS, all the above pieces are completed. This article will show you how to configure and use these tools, as well as describing some important new features in CPANPLUS that made them possible.
First, you need a copy of CPANPLUS 0.032 or above. I recommend the tarball automatically built from the distribution branch, available at http://p4.elixus.org/snap/cpanplus-dist.tar.gz; it should contain the latest bug-fixes and features marked as stable.
Since Jos's article and README already contained install instructions, I will not repeat the details here. However, please note that the dependency detection logic in Makefile.PL has been changed since Jos's previous article, which means when faced with this prompt:
[CPAN Test reporting] - Net::SMTP ...loaded. (2.24 >= 0.01) - IPC::Run ...loaded. (0.74 >= 0.55) - Test::Reporter ...failed! (needs 1.13) ==> Do you wish to install the 1 optional module(s)? [n]
You should generally answer y here, as only modules that can safely
install on your machine are displayed. The default n does not mean
we don't recommend it; it merely means it isn't mandatory for the
bare-bone CPANPLUS to function.
For this article's purpose, you need to answer y to all such
questions, since we will be using LWP, IPC::Run and Test::Reporter
extensively in testing-related functions.
After running Makefile.PL, you should run make test [3] like every
good user; if any dependent modules were selected in the previous step,
you will have to run make test as root, so it can fetch and install
these modules automatically before testing itself.
After the comforting All tests successful message appears on your
screen, just do a make install, and we are ready to go.
... or not. What if, instead of All tests successful, you see a
series of cryptic messages:
% sudo make test /usr/bin/perl Makefile.PL --config=-target,skiptest --installdeps=Term::Size,0.01 *** Installing dependencies... *** Installing Term::Size... Can't bless non-reference value at lib/CPANPLUS/Internals/Module.pm line 239. Compilation failed in require at Makefile.PL line 20. make: *** [installdeps] Error 255
An experienced Perl user will probably take the following steps:
Apparently, the above is exactly what Jorrit Waalboer (the bug's original reporter) did when he ran into this trouble. Thanks, Jorrit!
However, there are a number of problems with the procedure above. It might be thwarted at every step:
CPANPLUS didn't work! It can't install!#!@#@#!
in red-colored blinking HTML email, wasting bandwidth and causing
developers to ignore his mail completely.
make test at all? If so, the developers will
have no way to know that this bug has ever happened.
As you can see, both authors and users can certainly benefit a lot from an improved test reporting system -- one that simplifies the process of reporting a failed (or successful) installation, and lets users check for existing reports before downloading a module.
Such a system already exists; it's called CPAN Testers.
When most people run make test, it's immediately followed by a
make install; that is, people only test modules that they are going
to use. But they may not have the time or inclination to report the
outcome, for various reasons listed above.
CPAN Testers (http://testers.cpan.org/) is an effort to set up a Quality Assurance (QA) team for CPAN modules. As its homepage states:
The objective of the group is to test as many of the distributions on CPAN as possible, on as many platforms as possible.
The ultimate goal is to improve the portability of the distributions on CPAN, and provide good feedback to the authors.
Central to its operation is a mailing list, cpan-testers@perl.org, and a small program, cpantest. The program is a convenient way to report a distribution's test result, which is sent to the mailing list using an uniform format. For example:
# test passed, send a report automatically (no comments) cpantest -g pass -auto -p CPANPLUS-0.032 # test failed, launch an editor to edit the report, and cc to kane cpantest -g fail -p CPANPLUS-0.032 kane@cpan.org
The argument (pass/fail) after the -g option is called the
grade -- the overall result of a test run. It may also be na
(not available), which means the module is not expected to work on this
platform at all (Win32::Process on FreeBSD, for example), and
unknown in the case that no tests are provided in the distribution.
All recent CPAN uploads, as well as all test results, are forwarded
to the cpan-testers mailing list's subscribers -- CPAN testers.
After a distribution's release on CPAN, one or more testers will
pick it up, test it, then feed the result back to the author and to
the list. The testers don't have to know what the module is about;
all they do is to ensure it's working as advertised.
Test reports on the mailing list are automatically recorded in a ever-growing database. http://testers.cpan.org/search is its search interface, where you can query by distribution name, version, or the testing platform.
Theoretically, you can query that database before installing any CPAN module, to see if it works on your platform, and check for associated bug reports. The same information is also present at each module's page in http://search.cpan.org/, and maybe http://rt.cpan.org/ in the near future.
Alas, while this system certainly works, it is far from perfect. Here are some of its shortcomings:
cpan-testers list rarely submit
test reports, so coverage of platforms is limited to a few popular ones;
a heavily-used module may still be tested in only 2 or 3 platforms,
hardly representing its entire user base.
Fortunately, CPANPLUS addressed most of these issues, and made it significantly easier to participate in testing-related activities. Let's walk through them in the following sections.
CPANPLUS offers a straightforward way to check existing reports.
Simply enter cpanp -c ModuleName in the command line:
% cpanp -c CPANPLUS [/K/KA/KANE/CPANPLUS-0.032.tar.gz] PASS freebsd 4.5-release i386-freebsd
As you can see, this reports the most recent version of CPANPLUS, which passed its tests on FreeBSD as of this writing.
You can also specify a particular version of some distribution. For example, the version Jorrit was having problems with is 0.03, so he can do this:
% cpanp -c CPANPLUS-0.03
[/K/KA/KANE/CPANPLUS-0.03.tar.gz]
FAIL freebsd 4.2-stable i386-freebsd (*)
PASS freebsd 4.5-release i386-freebsd (*)
PASS linux 2.2.14-5.0 i686-linux
==> http://testers.cpan.org/search?request=dist&;dist=CPANPLUS
As you can see, there are three reports, two of which contain
additional details (marked with *), available at the URL listed
above. The failed one's says:
This bug seems to be present in machines upgrading to 0.03 from 0.01/0.02 releases. (It has since been fixed in the upcoming 0.031 release.)
Which exactly addressed Jorrit's original problem.
Another useful trick is using the o command in the CPANPLUS
Shell to list newer versions of installed modules on CPAN, and
check on them all with c *:
% cpanp CPAN Terminal> o 1 0.14 0.15 DBD::SQLite MSERGEANT 2 2.1011 2.1014 DBD::mysql JWIED
CPAN Terminal> c *
[/M/MS/MSERGEANT/DBD-SQLite-0.15.tar.gz]
FAIL freebsd 4.5-release i386-freebsd (*)
PASS linux 2.2.14-5.0 i686-linux
PASS solaris 2.8 sun4-solaris
==> http://testers.cpan.org/search?request=dist&;dist=DBD-SQLite
[/J/JW/JWIED/DBD-mysql-2.1014.tar.gz]
FAIL freebsd 4.5-release i386-freebsd (*)
PASS freebsd 4.5-release i386-freebsd
==> http://testers.cpan.org/search?request=dist&;dist=DBD-mysql
This way, you can safely upgrade your modules, confident in the knowledge that the newer version won't break the system.
Despite the handy utility of the c command, there will be no reports
if nobody submits them. CPANPLUS lets you send a report whenever
you've done a make test in the course of installing a module; to
enable this feature, please turn on the cpantest configuration
variable:
CPAN Terminal> s cpantest 1 CPAN Terminal> s save Your CPAN++ configuration info has been saved!
Afterwards, just use CPANPLUS as usual. You will be prompted during an installation, like below:
CPAN Terminal> i DBD::SQLite
Installing: DBD::SQLite
# ...
t/30insertfetch....ok
t/40bindparam......FAILED test 25
Failed 1/28 tests, 96.43% okay
t/40blobs..........dubious
Test returned status 2 (wstat 512, 0x200)
DIED. FAILED tests 8-11
Failed 4/11 tests, 63.64% okay
Failed 2/19 test scripts, 89.47% okay.
5/250 subtests failed, 98.00% okay.
*** Error code 9
Report DBD-SQLite-0.15's testing result (FAIL)? [y/N]: y
It always defaults to n, so you won't send out bogus reports by
mistake. If you enter y, different actions will happen, depending
on the test's outcome:
pass report is sent out
immediately to the cpan-testers list.
unknown report is sent to
the author and cpan-testers; the report will include a simple test
script, encourage the module author to include it in the next release,
and contain a URL of Michael Schwern's Test::Tutorial manpage.
perl Makefile.PL, make, or
make test), the default editor is launched to edit its fail
report, which includes the point of failure and the captured error
buffer.
You are free to add any text below the Additional comments line;
to cancel a report, just delete everything and save an empty file.
Before sending out a fail report, be sure to double-check if it is
really the module's problem. For example, if there's no libgtk
on your system, please don't send a report about failing to install
Gtk.
Also, be prepared to follow up with additional information when asked. The author may ask you to apply some patches, or to try out an experimental release; do help the author whenever you can.
While regular users can test modules as they install via the cpantest
option, and often provide important first-hand troubleshooting
information, we still need dedicated testers -- they can broaden the
coverage of available platforms, and may uncover problems previously
unforeseen by the author. Dedicated testing and regular reports are
complementary to each other.
Historically, CPAN testers would watch for notices of recent PAUSE
uploads posted on the cpan-testers list, grab them, test them
manually, and run the cpantest script, as we've seen in
What is CPAN Testers?. That script is bundled with CPANPLUS;
please refer to its POD documentation for additional options.
However, normally you won't be using it directly, as B<CPANPLUS> offers the F<cpansmoke> wrapper, which consolidates the I<download =E<gt> test =E<gt> copy buffer =E<gt> run cpantest =E<gt> file report> procedure into a single command (with F<cpantest> replaced by B<Test::Reporter>):
% cpansmoke Mail::Audit Mail::SpamAssassin # by module % cpansmoke Mail-Audit-2.1 Mail-SpamAssassin-2.20 # by distname % cpansmoke /S/SI/SIMON/Mail-Audit-2.1.tar.gz # or full name
Due to the need of testing new distributions as they are uploaded, cpansmoke will use http://www.cpan.org/ as its primary host, instead of the local mirror configured in your CPANPLUS settings. This behaviour may be overridden with the -l flag.
Since cpansmoke will stop right after make test rather than
installing any modules, it can test modules with different versions
than the ones installed on the system. However, since it won't
resolve prerequisites by default, you'll need to specify the -p
flag to test and report them.
The -d flag will display previous results before testing each module; similarly, -s will skip testing altogether if the module was already tested on the same platform. The latter should only be used with automated test (to reduce spamming), since the same platform can have different results.
There are numerous other flags available; please consult cpansmoke's manpage for further information.
Besides interactive batch-testing, cpansmoke also provides the capability of unattended testing; this concept is also covered by Mozilla Project's Tinderbox toolkit, as explained in its homepage:
There is a flock of dedicated build machines that do nothing but continually check out the source tree and build it, over and over again.
Essentially, if you have a machine with plenty of hard disk space and adequate bandwidth, you can set cpansmoke up so it tests each and every new module as it is uploaded.
The -a option lets cpansmoke enter the non-interactive mode. In
this mode, only failures during make test are reported, because
errors that occured during Makefile.PL or make are more likely
the machine's problem, not the module's.
Additionally, you should specify the -s flag to avoid duplicate reports, and -p to avoid false-negatives caused by unsatisfied dependencies.
Setting up an auto-smoking machine is very simple, using a mail filtering mechanism; just join the CPAN Testers list by sending an empty email to cpan-testers-subscribe@perl.org, and add the lines below to your Mail::Audit filter [4]:
fork || exec("sleep 40000 && cpansmoke -aps $1 >/dev/null 2>&1")
if $mail->subject =~ /^CPAN Upload: (.*)$/;
This rule will fork out a new cpansmoke process for each incoming mail about a CPAN upload. Note that it works only if incoming mail arrives no less than once every hour; otherwise it might fork-bomb your system to a grinding halt.
In case you're wondering, the sleep 40000 line is due to the fact
that a PAUSE upload needs several hours to appear on www.cpan.org.
Michael Schwern suggested that using a smoke queue would be a better
solution, since it allows error-checking and logging; implementations
are welcome.
If you are stuck with procmail, here's the recipe that does the same (but do consider upgrading to Mail::Audit):
:0hc * ^Subject: CPAN Upload: |sh -c "sleep 40000 && grep Subject|cut -f4 -d' '|xargs cpansmoke -aps >/dev/null 2>&1"
If you have suggestions on how to make this work on non-unix systems, please do let me know.
A programmable interface is the primary strength of CPANPLUS. All features listed above are available as separate methods of the CPANPLUS::Backend object. Since the module's manpage already contains detailed information, I'll just list some sample snippets below.
To show all reports of Acme::* on FreeBSD:
use CPANPLUS::Backend;
my $cp = CPANPLUS::Backend->new;
my $reports = $cp->reports( modules => [ map $_->{package}, values(
%{ $cp->search(type => 'module', list => ['^Acme::\b']) }
) ] );
while ( my ($name, $href) = each (%$reports) ) {
next unless $href;
my @entries = grep { $_->{platform} =~ /\bfreebsd\b/ } @$href;
next unless @entries;
print "[$name]\n";
for my $rv (@entries) {
printf "%8s %s%s\n", @{$rv}{'grade', 'platform'},
($rv->{detail} ? ' (*)' : '');
}
}
To test all Acme::* modules, but install all needed prerequisites:
use CPANPLUS::Backend;
my $cp = CPANPLUS::Backend->new;
$cp->configure_object->set_conf( cpantest => 1 );
$cp->install(
modules => [ map $_->{package}, values(
%{ $cp->search(type => 'module', list => ['^Acme::\b']) }
) ],
target => 'test',
prereq_target => 'install',
);
If you need to fine-tune various aspects during testing (timeout, prerequisite handling, etc.), please consult the source code of cpansmoke; most tricks involved are documented in comments.
As purl said, ``CPAN is a cultural mechanism.'' [5] It is not an abstraction filled with code, but rather depends on people caring enough to share code, as well as sharing useful feedback in order to improve each other's code.
With the advent of bug-tracking services [6] and automatic testing, the social collaboration aspect of CPAN has been greatly extended, and could be developed further into a full-featured Tinderbox system, or linked with each module's source-control repositories.
Also, since CPANPLUS is designed to accommodate different package
formats and distribution systems, it provides a solid foundation for
projects like Module::Build (make-less installation), NAPC
(distributed CPAN) and ExtUtils::AutoInstall (feature-based
dependency probing)... the possibilities are staggering, and you
certainly won't be disappointed in finding an interesting project to
work on. Happy hacking!
Although I have done some modest work in integrating CPANPLUS with CPAN testing, the work is really built on contributions from several brilliant individuals:
First, I'd like to dedicate this article to Elaine -HFB- Ashton, for her tireless efforts on perl advocacy, and for sponsoring my works as described in this article.
Thanks also goes to Graham Barr and Chris Nandor, for establishing the CPAN Testers at the first place, and coming up with two other important cultural mechanisms: CPAN Search and Use Perl; respectively.
To Jos Boumans, Joshua Boschert, Ann Barcomb and everybody in the CPANPLUS team -- you guys rock! Special thanks for another team member, Michael Schwern, for reminding everybody constantly that Kwalitee Is Job One.
To Paul Schinder, the greatest tester of all time, who submitted 10551 reports by hand out of 23203 to date, and kept CPAN Testers alive for a long time. And thanks for every fellow CPAN Tester who have committed their valuable time -- I hope cpansmoke can shoulder your burden a little bit.
To Simon Cozens, for his swiss-nuke Mail::Audit module, and for keep asking me to write 'something neat' for perl.com. :-)
To Jarkko Hietaniemi, for establishing CPAN; and to Andreas J. Koenig, for maintaining PAUSE and showing us what is possible with CPAN.pm.
Finally, if you decide to follow the steps in this article and participate in the testing process, then you have my utmost gratitude; let's make the world a better place.
make with nmake.
If you don't have nmake.exe in your %PATH, our Makefile.PL is
smart enough to fetch and install it for you.
the CPANPLUS manpage, the Mail::Audit manpage, the Test::Tutorial manpage
The cpanp, cpansmoke and cpantest utilities
Autrijus Tang <autrijus@autrijus.org>
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CPANPLUS::TesterGuide - Becoming a CPAN Tester with CPANPLUS |