About modules version on ActiveState's PPM

[DaWolf]

Greetings. Recently I was chatting with other monks on the CB about how some modules are too old on ActiveState's PPM, taking PAR as an example. I've promised I'd send an e-mail to them asking about this (since I'm a registered user of one of their products) and I did, so here is ActiveState's reply:

--- Begin of AS reply ---

Hi,

Our CPAN build system is run automatically on a weekly basis, and should be
fairly up-to-date. Many modules fail to build properly within our automated
system currently, for a variety of reasons. PAR 0.86, for example, is
currently failing :

http://ppm.activestate.com/BuildStatus/5.8-windows/windows-5.8/PAR-0.86.txt

best regards,

Jeff Griffiths
Technical Support Engineer
ActiveState - Dynamic Tools for Dynamic Languages

http://www.ActiveState.com

--- End of AS reply ---

I hope this can help a little to clarify if something should be done by the module author or if something should be said to AS.

If it's the second case, feel free to "use me" as a "spokesman".

Regards,

[chromatic]

I hope this can help a little to clarify if something should be done by the module author or if something should be said to AS.

I'd suggest something along the lines of "Reporting test and installation errors to module authors might help them release new versions which would install flawlessly."

I've never received any feedback from the ActiveState build farm, though I'd reject some of the errors reported on some of my modules (explicitly marked dependency not installed, for example, or CPAN module not configured) as Not My Problem.

[runrig]

I've never received any feedback from the ActiveState build farm, though I'd reject some of the errors reported on some of my modules (explicitly marked dependency not installed, for example...

They've considered sending out failure notices, and have so far rejected it because the current automated system is loaded with kinks, and they don't want to spam authors with false failure notices (like the one above, where it's not your fault, but a prerequisite module that failed). One of my modules depends on MIME-tools, and since it fails the build, my module fails also. Since there was a version of MIME-tools that did build, I emailed the ppm mailing list and my module is available in their repository. I also like to periodically check the build status of various modules (I like that link better than the full list of modules, which takes too long to load).

[BUU]

Er, maybe it's just me, but I don't see an error listed in that link?