Dear monks,

I've recently released WWW::Curl 4.00 to CPAN.

I've waited a few days and noticed that most of my cpan test failures in the latest release are not definite test errors, but rather cases of :

Confused test output: test 9 answered after test 12
Confused test output: test 10 answered after test 16
Confused test output: test 11 answered after test 19
Confused test output: test 12 answered after test 20

[download]

This made me wonder, what's going on? The test file in question is singlethreaded and uses Test::More's 'ok', plus a for loop. How is it possible then, that test output gets printed in the wrong order?

I'm either missing something really obvious or this is something arcane.This test is responsible for most of the FAIL reports, however there is another interesting case.

You see, WWW::Curl requires libcurl to be installed, so I've included requires_external_bin    'curl-config'; in Makefile.PL to provide a rudimentary check for the existence of the library. Still, FAIL gets reported instead of NA that I intended if the prerequisite library isn't available. Since this is clearly not it, what is the proper way to have automated testing degrade gracefully to NA when an external build time dependency like a library isn't available and because of that there is no hope of building the library properly?

update: the latter turned out to be a bug in Module::Install, which should be fixed in the next M::I release.

update 2: the former was an interesting bug, WWW::Curl kept spewing out debugging/header output under some circumstances, which applied to ssl debugging aswell. That happened to be of course non-human readable binary output - without \n endings, so when Test::More tried to output "ok 12 - whatever", it got appended after that binary gunk. This caused Test::Harness to get confused.

In reply to Test failures matter by szbalint

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