Hi,
A few hours back Jan Dubois posted the following (under the above title) to some of the ActiveState mailing lists. Some may find it interesting:

--- quote ---

Our PPM build server infrastructure has been very maintenance intensive; it needed some manual tweaking and fixing on a weekly basis. We finally couldn't stand doing it any longer and turned them off a couple of weeks ago. The PPM repositories are still there, but they are not being updated anymore.

But fear not! We took the time saved from having to do all the build monitoring and fixing and started writing a new simplified build system that avoids many of the problems the old one runs into.

We have built test repositories for 32-bit ActivePerl 5.10 on Windows and Linux and would welcome any feedback from people willing to beta-test them. They are currently being hosted at:

http://ppm.activestate.com/beta

There you'll find additional information about configuring them as your default PPM4 repositories. It contains links to the build-status tables at the bottom (one per letter), e.g.

http://ppm.activestate.com/beta/idx/W.html

If you are a CPAN author then you will also want to check the status page listing all the modules from your CPAN directory, e.g.

http://ppm.activestate.com/beta/author/GAAS.html

We are interested in feedback, especially regarding:

* Do you experience any problems with either the commandline or the GUI PPM client with these new repositories?

* Do the modules installed from these repositories work properly on your system? Did they fetch all necessary prerequisites?

* If you are a module author and your module did not build or test properly: do the build logs contain sufficient information to understand _why_ they were not being built?

* Is there any information that you would like to see in the build status results? What is it, and what do you need it for?

Please send your feedback to the PPM mailing list at ...

--- end quote ---
<snipped out the mailto>
--- quote ---

... or enter a bug report in our bug database (use "ActivePerl" product and "PPM_Server" component):

http://bugs.activestate.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=ActivePerl

Here are a couple of known issues that we are already aware of:

* Some packages contain additional files that are not needed (and ignored) by the PPM client (HTML documentation, debugging symbols). This has already been fixed in the build system and all packages build during the last few days should already have these additional files stripped.

* Modules bundled with ActivePerl use static linking for all non- standard additional libraries. E.g. Crypt-SSLeay does not require that libssl32.so or libssl32.dll is installed as well. This makes it easier to bundle these modules with packagers like PAR, PerlApp or Perl2exe, and also avoids putting additional DLLs on the PATH where they might conflict with different versions of the same DLLs from other applications.

For all modules bundled by ActivePerl (and for some additional popular modules we have defined on our internal "watchlist") we want to make sure the PPM packages will also use statically linked libraries. This has not been done yet, so especially the Linux packages may include references to locally installed additional libraries (libz.so, libgd.so etc).

* The layout of the build status information is preliminary and hasn't been reviewed by a web-designer yet.

--- end quote ---

Cheers,
Rob

In reply to PPM build servers are dead -- long live PPM! by syphilis

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