in reply to Advice wanted for debugging CPAN Testers failures

Got a git repo that we can point to for our own testing? I wrote Test::BrewBuild for testing these kinds of things (note that in win2k12+, the bbtester program can NOT be run in the background, one must use --fg mode. Background mode works fine on win2k8), and I'll gladly throw the tests against as many servers and perl configurations I can :)

You can test against all Perl/Berrybrew instances installed locally like this (inside of your distribution's root directory):

# test against all installed perls, without doing anything else brewbuild # -r removes all installed Perls, less the one you're 'switch'ed to # -n installs N number of perls, randomly, and tests against them all brewuild -r -n 4 # same thing, but after removing all Perls, install # specific versions to test against brewbuild -r -i 5.22.1 -i 5.24.0 -i 5.10.1

Essentially, the ideal test is to wipe all of your perl/berrybrew instances away on each test run, so you are literally starting them from scratch.

When all else fails, email/contact the owner of the tester. This is listed in the Tester column under each OS/Perl ver test. For example, see this aggregate test report. Sometimes their email is listed in the end test results, other times, you can just drop their name into an Author search on MetaCPAN. If you can't find contact info on their Meta page, open up one of their distributions, and an email address can likely be found down around the Copyright section of the documentation.

People who operate testers for us are very friendly, and are willing to help diagnose problems you can't... such as running custom builds on specific configurations outside of normal CPAN Testers operations, providing feedback on their environment, or even looking at the code to see if they can spot issues you may have missed. (In fact, some of them are proactive; they'll email you about a test problem if they indeed know what the problem is before you've read your failure email the next morning).

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Re^2: Advice wanted for debugging CPAN Testers failures
by pryrt (Abbot) on Aug 23, 2016 at 19:55 UTC

      I can repro some of the failures on Linux Mint with Perlbrew and my brewbuild application.

      I just did a whole bunch of transplanting so I'm done for the day (time to go read; I bought the Harry Potter collection and I'm on the second one ;), but I will have a good look tomorrow to see if I can figure out why it's breaking. If I don't get the time to thoroughly look at it tomorrow and you still don't have any *nix VMs configured, /msg me your email address and I'll give you access to one of my AWS servers that you can troubleshoot with when I get home from work tomorrow.

      Here's the test build output:

      spek@sainai:~/repos/Data-IEEE754-Tools$ brewbuild -r -i 5.10.1 -i 5.20 +.3 - removing previous installs... - installing perl-5.10.1... - installing perl-5.20.3... 5.24.0 :: PASS 5.20.3 :: FAIL 5.10.1 :: FAIL

      Here's the full brewbuild FAIL log for 5.20.3.

        Thanks for your help. I think with that fail log, and some confirmation, and the other inputs, I'll be able to debug it (and given more info about which versions fail, I might be able to even replicate). Don't feel like you have to do more in-depth; you've helped plenty already.

        Since this is mostly my coffee-break and waiting-for-long-data-processess-to-finish keep-my-mind-active project, there can be long gaps between when I have time to work on it. Hopefully, I'll be able to get one or more failing installations tomorrow.