Hi,

(Herein lies a complaint against the CPAN test reporting process ... not against the testers themselves, who provide a wonderful service.)

The "CPAN Testers" entry at http://search.cpan.org/~SISYPHUS/Math-MPC-0.45/ tells me that there are 8 FAILS for that module. If I click on the "View" link, the details are not yet to be seen there ... but I can find those details at http://cpantesters.perl.org/author/SISYPHUS.html (near the bottom of that page).

Each of those FAILS arise because a requisite 3rd party C library (namely, the mpc library) is not installed on the tester's machine. This deficiency in the tester's environment is being detected at the 'Makefile.PL' stage - at which point the 'Makefile.PL' process prints out an explanatory message and dies, without creating a Makefile. I was hopeful that the result would therefore be an "NA" instead of a "FAIL".

In my opinion it's ludicrous to assert that a module that needs to be built against a specific 3rd party C library has "FAIL"ed simply because the machine on which it is being built does not have that requisite C library installed. (It makes about as much sense as giving libwin a "FAIL" because it won't build on linux.) What can I do to ensure that, in future, "NA" is returned as the verdict when a tester tries to build the module without having the mpc library installed ?

Cheers,
Rob

In reply to Ridiculous "FAIL" reports from CPAN Testers by syphilis

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