I've encountered an interesting conundrum.

About a week ago, I finally published my work for the first time to the CPAN repository. As a result of that, my throw away little project is suddenly the subject of smoketests, from which I am learning quite a bit about the build process and a little about the challenges of writing portable code. (For instance, I had never used perl Build.PL to install a module. Being a creature of habit, I used make; make test; sudo make install; had it work and never moved past that. Apparently others do it differently.)

At any rate, to my conundrum.

Without use Test::More qw(no_plan);, trying to install my new module on a test box with a base Debian install throws an error reading: Undefined subroutine &skip called at t/perlcritic.t line __. If I use the module but fail to define a plan I get: You tried to run tests without a plan!  Gotta have a plan.. And if I provide a plan, I get, as hoped for:

ok 1 # skip because Test::Perl::Critic required for these tests.

However when I run this test on my development machine, I get:

You tried to plan twice at t/perlcritic.t line 9.
# Looks like your test died before it could output anything.
[download]

unless I comment out the line required on my test box, in which case the tests run and I get:

1..1
ok 1 - Test::Perl::Critic for "blib/lib/GD/Graph/Thermometer.pm"
[download]

So my questions this evening are these:

• How do I resolve this so this test runs predictably everywhere?
• How can I cleanly uninstall my module so I have a clean environment in which to test installing it again?
• Is there a way to have Test::Perl::Critic installed but to have it ignored while running my test so I can evaluate how the script will respond with and without the module, without having to run this test box too?

And the problematic test script, reads:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Test::More qw(no_plan);

SKIP:
{

  eval 'use Test::Perl::Critic';
  skip('because Test::Perl::Critic required for these tests.',1) if $@
+;
  Test::Perl::Critic::all_critic_ok();

}
[download]

Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks,

-- Hugh

UPDATE:

Thanks to jasonk and perrin for what turned out to be the portable working answer. My T::P::C enabled machine, running this test code, returns:

1..1
ok 1 - Test::Perl::Critic for "blib/lib/GD/Graph/Thermometer.pm"
[download]

And my base install machine without this dependency, returns:

1..0 # Skip because Test::Perl::Critic required for these tests
[download]

That having been resolved, I'll send version 0.05 up to the repository and see what the smoketesters have to say about it next. Thanks everyone for their input and feedback.

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