in reply to Silence CPAN Testers on obviously broken platforms?

Make sure Makefile.PL (or whatever build system you use) exits with zero status

E.g. When one needs a $UNIFY environmental variable for a module to work, add this in top of your Makefile.PL:

# Be kind to testers, not verbose
if (exists $ENV{AUTOMATED_TESTING} and $ENV{AUTOMATED_TESTING}) {
    exists $ENV{UNIFY} or exit 0;
    }

[download]

Of course you can make the expression as complicated as you wish :)

Note that the CPAN Testers Reports will show "UNKNOWN" instead of "FAIL" and the matrix will show orange instead of red.


Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

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Re^2: Silence CPAN Testers on obviously broken platforms?
by tinita (Parson) on Nov 19, 2012 at 13:27 UTC
    don't you rather mean "exit with non-zero status"? zero means success. if you want to get an UNKNOWN report, you shouldn't return zero...
[reply]

      Nope, see http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/CPANAuthorNotes

      exit 0 means Makefile.PL succeeded , so rating could PASS ,FAIL, or UNKNOWN, depends on subsequent steps

      exit 2 means Makefile.PL died , so rating could be FAIL or NA depending on message

      exit 0 and 'Makefile' not created , rating is UNKNOWN

      exit 0 and 'Makefile' created, rating depends 'make' and 'make test' to determine PASS or FAIL

      Now at one point the cpan testers reporting service mixed up these conventions I described, started treating NA as FAIL and UNKNOWN as NA or some such mix of results (not important now)...

      So follow CPANAuthorNotes, to avoid FAIL, exit 0 to get UNKNOWN, or Devel::AssertOS to get NA

      UNKNOWN is safer than NA, cause some Win32 modules can run on linux, and some day they might all run on linux :)

      NA is like the faulty practice of parsing user-agent-string or testing browser version details to determine if the client supports cookies and ajax

      UNKNOWN is like trying to set a cookie to see if cookies are supported or checking if document.XMLHttpRequest is available to know if ajax is supported

[reply]

        Excellent summary, that somehow derives a greater degree of clarity out of the CPAN Testers documentation than the documentation itself manages. This thread just got added to my Personal Nodelet. :)


        Dave

[reply]

      No, the FAQ explicitly states:

      "How can I stop getting FAIL reports for missing libraries or other non-Perl dependencies?"

      If you have some special dependencies and don't want to get CPAN Testers reports if a dependency is not available, just exit from the Makefile.PL or Build.PL normally (with an exit code of 0) before the Makefile or Build file is created.

      exit 0 unless some_dependency_is_met ();

      Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn
[reply]

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