Re^2: Silence CPAN Testers on obviously broken platforms?

[tinita]

don't you rather mean "exit with non-zero status"? zero means success. if you want to get an UNKNOWN report, you shouldn't return zero...

[Anonymous Monk]

Nope, see http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/CPANAuthorNotes

exit 0 means Makefile.PL succeeded , so rating could PASS ,FAIL, or UNKNOWN, depends on subsequent steps

exit 2 means Makefile.PL died , so rating could be FAIL or NA depending on message

exit 0 and 'Makefile' not created , rating is UNKNOWN

exit 0 and 'Makefile' created, rating depends 'make' and 'make test' to determine PASS or FAIL

Now at one point the cpan testers reporting service mixed up these conventions I described, started treating NA as FAIL and UNKNOWN as NA or some such mix of results (not important now)...

So follow CPANAuthorNotes, to avoid FAIL, exit 0 to get UNKNOWN, or Devel::AssertOS to get NA

UNKNOWN is safer than NA, cause some Win32 modules can run on linux, and some day they might all run on linux :)

NA is like the faulty practice of parsing user-agent-string or testing browser version details to determine if the client supports cookies and ajax

UNKNOWN is like trying to set a cookie to see if cookies are supported or checking if document.XMLHttpRequest is available to know if ajax is supported

[davido]

Excellent summary, that somehow derives a greater degree of clarity out of the CPAN Testers documentation than the documentation itself manages. This thread just got added to my Personal Nodelet. :)

[Tux]

No, the FAQ explicitly states:

"How can I stop getting FAIL reports for missing libraries or other non-Perl dependencies?"

If you have some special dependencies and don't want to get CPAN Testers reports if a dependency is not available, just exit from the Makefile.PL or Build.PL normally (with an exit code of 0) before the Makefile or Build file is created.

exit 0 unless some_dependency_is_met ();