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CPAN-Testers-0.02
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/ CPAN::Testers

NAME

CPAN::Testers - QA of CPAN distributions via cross-platform testing

SYNOPSIS

With the explosive growth and increased interest in the CPAN Testers, it was felt useful to create this namespace placeholder to house the newly architected next-generation CPAN Testers stack, which is now in development. This namespace also provides for the consolidation of related work under one unified and easily identifiable umbrella. Co-maint permissions in this namespace are freely granted to anyone working on any area of the CPAN Testers infrastructure.

DESCRIPTION

Started in 1998 by Graham Barr and Chris Nandor, the CPAN Testers exist to provide quality assurance of CPAN distributions via cross-platform testing with many versions of perl. Some of our goals include the increase of portability of CPAN distributions and to provide authors with helpful feedback.

Nowadays, it's quite effortless to get involved--even casually--with mature support for CPAN Testing with both CPAN and CPANPLUS. Testing methods ranging from manual to automatic are available.

There are many distributions that comprise the CPAN Testers stack (please forgive my poor artwork). The current architecture is as follows:

                  [POE-Component-CPAN-YACSmoke]
[cpantest]                     |
     \                  [CPAN-YACSmoke]
      \                   (CPANPLUS)
       \                     /
        \  [CPAN-Reporter]  /
         \     (CPAN)      /
          \      |        /
           [Test-Reporter]
                 |
              [SMTP]
                 |
       [cpan-testers@perl.org] 
            (Data Store)
                 |
[nntp://nntp.perl.org/perl.cpan.testers]
          |                       \  
  [CPAN-WWW-Testers-Generator]  [cpanstats]
          |                        |
     [CPAN-WWW-Testers]    [http://perl.grango.org/]
          |
 [http://cpantesters.perl.org/]

Test::Reporter is the delivery mechanism for the test report data, as provided by one of its upstream constituents. A transport is then invoked to submit the test report to the cpan-testers@perl.org mailing list. The mailing list is the current de facto data store for the test reports. From there, web-based presentation of the reports are provided courtesy of the CPAN-WWW-Testers and CPAN-WWW-Testers-Generator distributions, and web-based statistics are provided courtesy of cpanstats.

Improvements to this architecture are currently in discussion. Plans for abstracting discrete functionality (parsing, grading, transports, etc.) into separate distributions within this namespace are in progress. Additionally, we are working on an HTTP transport for the submission of test reports at the request of the perl.org folks, Adam Kennedy, and others.

For more information on the CPAN Testers please visit the links below:

CAVEATS

This is the second draft of this document. Undoubtedly, there may be various bits that need some adjustments. Feedback is most welcome.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2007 Adam J. Foxson and the CPAN Testers. All rights reserved.

LICENSE

This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

SEE ALSO

AUTHORS

Adam J. Foxson <afoxson@pobox.com>, having been involved with the CPAN Testers for over half a decade, is the principal author of Test::Reporter.

Thank you to David Golden and Barbie for their advice and suggestions on improving this documentation.