*NEW* CPAN Testers Reports

[barbie]

As soon as DNS catches up for you, the all new CPAN Testers Reports site is now live. There are plenty of changes and fixes that have gone into this release, and my thanks specifically to Gabor Szabo and David E. Wheeler for contributing patches.

So what do you get with the new site? Well thanks to Gabor, a pass matrix has been added to each distribution page. On each author page, the distributions now link to their own respective pages. David E Wheeler's patch has been incorporated to provide an RSS feed that excludes the PASS reports. In addition the RSS feeds now limit to at most the last 100 reports. For the author page, the very latest release is listed, and not just the latest with reports, so authors can see more immediately whether their latest version is known about. On the distribution page, all known releases are listed, with those having no reports having text saying that. This latter change has been a cause for concern with some authors, as the latest versions were often getting missed. Unfortunately this was due to everything being referenced as per the BACKPAN files, and did not include everything that was still on CPAN. There have been many minor fixes, which all help to contribute to better usability.

However, the biggest change is the ability to select what you wish to see on the page. The options currently available are only the beginning, as these were all the easy ones to sort out. More complex changes, such as being able to filter on OS and/or Perl version, and preferences cookie recording, are planned for a later release along with many other improvements. Although the most notable change will be to turn the site into a dynamic one, which will be able to respond to new reports much more immediately.

If you do have further suggestions for improvement, please post them to RT, so I don't forget them.

For those that are wondering what has happened to the testers.db.bz2 file, that file is no longer generated for the new site, as it doesn't contain enough data for the current cpantesters.org sites. The new file is at http://devel.cpantesters.org/cpanstats.db.gz, and contains several changes from the previous schema. To see the current schema, see CPAN::WWW::Testers::Generator. In the short term, if you still need the old schema formatted database file you can grab it from http://cpantesters.perl.org/testers.db.bz2. The old site is currently maintained by Robert and Ask at perl.org and will continue to be updated as per the old schema until at least the new site has had a chance to settle down, and probably not until there is a more interactive API available to the data. However, if you are using the old database, please think about moving over to the new format, as the contents of the new database are now more actively monitored and maintained.

And latestly a request. Assuming nothing breaks and the new changes work out, the definitive domain for all the CPAN Testers related websites should be cpantesters.org. As such, if you have documentation in your modules or on your websites that references any other domain (whether for the Reports site or the Statistics site for example), could you update them to use only the cpantesters.org domain, with the correct sub-domain (Reports is www.cpantesters.org, Statistics is stats.cpantesters.org and the Wiki is wiki.cpantesters.org, etc.), for your next release. The reason being that other domain names may or may not work in the future, and the use of the new domain name will make it easier for everyone to remember the sites they wish to go to for anything related to CPAN Testers. It also doesn't hurt having all these references adding to search engine rankings either.

[Anonymous Monk]

How long until the search.cpan.org links are working again?

For example http://search.cpan.org/dist/CGI.pm/
links to
http://www.cpantesters.org/show/CGI.pm.html#CGI.pm-3.42
which is gone

[barbie]

I've manually added a symlink to fake that fix. Long term fix should be to ask Lincoln to take the -pm out of the distribution name.

[Anonymous Monk]

Long term fix should be to ask Lincoln to take the -pm out of the distribution name.
I've got to disagree with you there. Why should the distribution name have any impact upon testers site? It exposes a flaw in your scheme, but it worked before, it should continue working.