Is there a way to stop the CPAN Testing process?
And if there is, should I?

Last evening I uploaded a new version of Image::Square with new tests using PNG images for input and output instead of JPEG images. This followed the advice I got on Testing image output

The first two test results came in just before I settled down to sleep and they were both PASS so I went to sleep content...only to check this morning and find lots of FAILs 😕

This morning I uploaded a new version using the native GD image format and using cmp_ok instead of ok from hippo's Basic Testing Tutorial

So now that this latest version is uploaded, is there a way to stop CPAN Testers from wasting their precious resources on a module version that will fail at least some of the time? Does it stop automatically when a new version is uploaded?

Edit:
Changed link to point to GitHub repo and not the CPAN Tester results.

I've written Image::Square to make square images...

One of the tests I've carried out is to visually check that the new square image is taken from the correct part of the original image.

How can I convert that visual test into code?

Should I manually verify the image it is supposed to create, then take a hash of that image and compare the hash from the same process during testing? If I do it this way, I will need to use a hashing module and I'm reluctant to create a dependency that is only used in the tests. Perhaps I need to skip the test if the hashing module isn't installed.

If I do the comparison using a hash, will it work cross-platform or can I expect tests to fail on some OS's?

My 1000th post!

It's a little under 3 years since I created an account here on Perl Monks. For many years, I'd occasionally visited The Monastery thanks to Google leading me here when I asked a Perl-related question - which was quite frequently. But, back in November 2020, I had a few new projects going on and thought I needed to "raise my game". I had no concept of what that actually meant.

My expectation was that I'd learn a few new coding styles, be a bit quicker and, perhaps, a bit clearer.

What has actually happened, and continues to happen, is that my whole approach to writing code has changed...drastically!

Allow me to illustrate by way of an example...

Just this week I was writing some code for the admin part of my partner's website Pawsies. We need to be able to upload pictures of dogs that we look after, and it's helpful if those pictures are square so they display consistently.

The whole website uses Template - something I discovered in The Monastery. The web scripts are in their own directory and not mixed up with the other site files, again a learning from The Monastery. The upshot is sites that are easier to navigate, easier to link to as everything is not in the cgi-bin and easier to maintain.

However, it goes much further than that.

In the past, if I wanted square images, I would have hard-coded the logic to produce them into the script that needed them. But this week, instead I wrote a module to do only that operation. It is where my thought process started, it was not an afterthought. The design started with deciding exactly what it was supposed to do and by jotting down how I would know if it was successful. The basis of a test!

I then looked to see if there were any extra generalisations that could be made to make it more useful to other people or when I reuse it elsewhere. So, a resizing parameter was added to change the size of the square image and a position parameter was added to determine where abouts the square is taken from in the original image.

Only then was the code written followed by the tests...

Once the tests all ran fine, it was bundled up and uploaded to CPAN for all to use. Currently as a dev release so I get some test results before the production release. It's all looking good...

Before joining The Monastery this would have been a bit of messy, but functional code locked away somewhere in a difficult-to-maintain script. I considered CPAN modules to be for other, superior "proper" coders...not for me. Now I look for the best way to do it for my needs now, my needs in future when I come to maintain the code or need similar functionality and for the needs of the wider Perl community as The Monastery has shown me that I have something to contribute as well as to learn.

Watch out for a testing question coming soon - one of the tests for Image::Square required visually inspecting the output image and I don't know how to convert that into a usable test...see, lots more to learn and that's something I fully embrace!

Thank you to everyone who has helped, inspired, questioned and critised me over the last 1000 post - it really is appreciated 👍

Is there a built-in method to find when a Template file was last modified? I want something similar to JavaScript's document.lastModified which always seem to return the current timestamp for dynamically generated pages.

For more completeness in case I'm missing something obvious...

I have lots of web pages on a website. They share a common head.tt and foot.tt files. So (typically) 3 Template files and called for each HTTP request: head, body and foot. 'body' will change for each page. I want to be able to put a custom <meta modified="...."> at the head of the page that can be read by a sitemap generator and along with a custom priority indicator. I'd prefer not to have to update the modified time each time a body template file is changed.

I looked at using the Last-modified HTTP header but that is missing for dynamically generated pages.

I've come across some unexpected behaviour that I thought was obvious but it seems not so your input would be welcome...

On a webserver I have a maintenance script that runs off CRON every morning. The filesystem looks like this:

/home/username/website/prod/lib       <- modules
/home/username/website/prod/template  <- templates
/home/username/website/prod/www       <- HTTP root
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use lib "$ENV{'DOCUMENT_ROOT'}/../lib";
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However, the maintenance script is located at:

/home/username/website/prod/lib/maintain.pl
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use Site::Utils;
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/home/username/website/prod/lib/Site/Utils.pm
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I thought I could simply use lib "."; to add the current directory to @INC or even leave it out altogether and Perl would find the module by searching the filepath relative to the running script.

But both these approaches result in Perl reporting that it cannot find the module...

What am I overlooking here?

I've come across some unexpected behaviour and I am struggling to understand it...can you help?

perl -e "print (localtime)[6];"
syntax error at -e line 1, near ")["
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
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...but...

perl -e "my $test = (localtime)[6];print $test"
5
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So I thought it was a problem of print not converting the array to a scalar so I tried...

perl -e "print scalar (localtime)[6]"
syntax error at -e line 1, near ")["
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
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What is the difference here with using an intermediate variable that doesn't happen when using print directly?

I've released a new version of Business::Stripe::Webhook with a modified constructor following the discussion about STDIN typeglob

At the same time I have added some extra, more thorough tests. All the tests pass as expected here locally but now it has reached CPAN Testers, I have a failure. I can usually work out why something is failing from the diagnostic information...but I cannot see the problem in this case. Can you help please?

This is the CPAN Tester Report and this is the test file:

#!perl
use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;
use Test::More;

use Business::Stripe::Webhook;

#plan tests => 3;
my $count = 0; 
print "\n";

my $payload;
read(DATA, $payload, 10000);

my $webhook_fail   = Business::Stripe::Webhook->new(
    signing_secret  => 'whsec_...',
    'payload'       => $payload,
    'invoice-paid'  => \&pay_invoice,
);

$webhook_fail->process();

ok( !$webhook_fail->success, "Signature error" );

my $signing_secret = 'whsec_12345ABCDEFGHIJKLM';
$ENV{'HTTP_STRIPE_SIGNATURE'} = 't=ABCDEFGHIJ,v1=917fd62f6828ceb0509ae
+bd9ee94e4c455887b6c174ef94037e089265c8c575c';

my $webhook_pass   = Business::Stripe::Webhook->new(
    signing_secret  => $signing_secret,
    'payload'       => $payload,
    'invoice-paid'  => \&pay_invoice,
);

$webhook_pass->process();

ok( $webhook_pass->success, "Signature pass" );

sub pay_invoice {
    is( $_[0]->{'object'}, 'event', "pay.invoice handled - " . ++$coun
+t );
}

done_testing($count + 2);

__DATA__
{
  "id": "evt_1NFK32EfkkexSbWLZb6LoEap",
  "object": "event",
  "api_version": "2020-08-27",
  "data": {
     ...  bigger JSON object ...
  }
}
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edited - to correct typo in module link

As part of the tests for Business::Stripe::Webhook I am getting an expected error on STDERR

C:\Users\Bod\Perl\Business-Stripe-Webhook\Business-Stripe-Webhook>prov
+e -lv t/02-payload.t
t/02-payload.t ..
1..6
ok 1 - Didn't instantiate
ok 2 - Missing payload data
ok 3 - Instantiated
ok 4 - pay.invoice handled
ok 5 - All webhooks handled
Stripe Webhook Error: Invalid Stripe Signature
ok 6 - Signature error
ok
All tests successful.
Files=1, Tests=6,  1 wallclock secs ( 0.03 usr +  0.01 sys =  0.05 CPU
+)
Result: PASS
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Does it matter that there is an error displayed between Tests 5 & 6?

Will it confuse people or automated installation scripts? If so, is there an accepted way to deal with this?

One of the modules I have recently released to CPAN reads JSON data from STDIN on a webserver. To write the tests I have had to simulate this.

Using code I found in an answer on SO, I have written code similar to this test:

use strict;
use warnings;

*STDIN = *DATA;

while (my $test = <STDIN>) {
    print "$test\n";
}

__DATA__
one
two
three
four
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I've read the documentation and still don't understand it.

My understanding of a typeglob is that it is a legacy left over from the days before Perl had references. It manipulates the scalar, array and hash of the same name simultaneously. Still, it shouldn't be used in modern Perl because it is generally bad practice to call arrays, hashes and scalars by the same name and references have replaced its necessity. References, thanks to my time in The Monastery, I understand reasonably well.

Is there a better way to do what the above code does?

Can you help me understand this use of a typeglob and typeglobs more generally?

Am I able to 'reset' the __DATA__ input so that I can use the same input for testing again or should I put multiple tests in different test files?

When releasing a new module, how do you decide which minimum version of the dependencies to require?

I am about to release Business::Stripe::Webhook and it has these dependencies in Makefile.PL:

PREREQ_PM => {
    'JSON::PP'       => '2.00',
    'HTTP::Tiny'     => '0.014',
    'Digest::SHA'    => '5.94',
    'Time::Piece'    => '1.32',
},
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I strongly suspect that I could go for earlier ones but don't want to risk my code breaking because of a broken dependency. That's just annoying and frustrating for everyone. Equally, I don't want to force people to update every module if it is not necessary.

So, how do you select the minimum version number for your dependencies?