Re: Advice wanted for debugging CPAN Testers failures

[pryrt]

Final update:

I've made my virtual machine with a slew of linux perls in perlbrew, and updating my berrybrew list to include more, I was able to do a complete debug of the problem.

First issue: I was using the default stringification of the floating-point numbers for the comparison in the failing tests... which was what was causing my linux 5.8.5, and the >= 5.22, to pass. Really, they would have been failing if I'd been using my stringification rather than Perl's, and I would have found the real problem before doing my beta release to CPAN to get the CPAN Testers results.

Second issue: Perl has apparently decided to not follow the IEEE Std 754™-2008 rules, which specify that for abs() (and negate() and copySign()), NaNs are to be treated identically to other numeric values, and have the sign bit cleared (or negated, or copied). Since abs never claims to be be following the standard, that's their perogative. I just got rid of all instances of CORE::abs() in my test suite, and have specifically recommended using the module's abs() function when standard-compliant handling of NaN signs is desired.

Now on to the one last feature I'm adding in this group, and then a potential v0.014 live release to CPAN in the near future.

Thanks to ++stevieb and ++syphilis for the advice, debugging, and testing.

[stevieb]

Nice work! Glad you were able to get it sorted.