I'm putting together an abstract for a Lightning Talk on the subject of Testing Modules for CPAN. I hope to give the talk at YAPC::America::North this year.

Now, I realize that - if accepted - I only have five minutes to talk, but I want to be as useful as I can for as many people as I can in that five minutes. And not everyone uses the same kind of computer that I do. So I'm trying to gather information about installation/testing methods that are unknown to me.

Most of my first-hand experience has been on a Unix variant (HP/UX, Red Hat Linux, MacOS X) at the command line.

When installing by hand, I do the typical... 

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
sudo make install

[download]
with the minor twist of running cpantest to report results.

When installing through CPANPLUS, I just use the 't MODULE' option of the default shell.

I know how to install modules on Win32 with ActiveState's ppm, but I don't know how it does what it does, or if it affords any opportunity to test the module before installing it (much less a way to report the test results to CPAN-Testers.)

So - how do you install Perl modules on your operating system for your build of Perl? And when you do - what methods are available to you for testing the modules along the way?

In reply to How do YOU test/install modules? by mrbbking

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