[Philadelphia-pm] Test against Perl 5 dev: how you can help

[James E Keenan <jkeenan@pobox.com>]

Philadelphia friends,

This message is a follow-up to my presentation at Philadelphia.pm last 
Monday (http://thenceforward.net/perl/talks/phlpm20180312/).

I would like to invite you to participate in a Perl community activity 
which will help get Perl 5.28.0 out the door.  You can help by testing a 
list of 10 CPAN modules which are currently failing against Perl 5.27.* 
blead and analyzing the cause of those failures.  Once you've analyzed 
those failures, we'll discuss how to report your findings and, possibly, 
correct those failures.

The Specifics

1. We expect to release our monthly development release, perl-5.27.10, 
on Tuesday, March 20.  By Wednesday, a tarball of that release should be 
available on CPAN mirrors via HTTP or FTP.  You will download that 
tarball, unpack it, configure Perl however you customarily do, build and 
install it on your system.

2. You will install 'cpanm' against perl-5.27.10.

3. You will use 'cpanm' to try to install the 10 CPAN modules on a list 
you've been provided.  If the result of that attempt to install is 
anything other than 'PASS' -- i.e., if it's 'FAIL', 'NA' (not 
applicable) or 'UNKNOWN' -- you will attempt to investigate the cause of 
that result.

4. We'll then discuss the best way to address this problem.  For instance:

* Does the module fail during its configuration stage?  Did that happen 
because some external library is not installed?  If so, what happens 
once that module is installed?

* Does the module fail during the build stage, e.g., a failure during 
'make'?  If so, can we figure out when that build started to fail?

* Is the failure due to defective code in the CPAN module?  Then we will 
open a bug ticket in the module's issue tracker and, if possible, supply 
a patch or pull request.

The Goal

Our goal is to reduce the number of seemingly "broken" CPAN modules in 
advance of the release of Perl-5.28.0 in April or May.  The fewer 
apparently broken modules we have, then the easier it will be for us to 
track the impact of Perl 5 development on CPAN over the course of the 
coming 5.29.* development cycle.

The Means

You can use some of the CPAN distributions I discussed in my talk to do 
this:  Perl-Download-FTP, CPAN-cpantesters-reporter-RetainReports, 
Test-Against-Dev.  But, this being Perl, TIMTOWTDI, so as long as you 
get perl-5.27.10 and cpanm installed, you'll be fine.  I'll provide you 
with Perl programs using those modules -- but you'll be free to tinker 
with them.

You can do this on any Unix-ish operating system:  Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, 
etc.  (You can try this on Windows, but I haven't been able to try this 
there myself, so you'll be more on your own in that case).

The Timespan

Because we're working on a schedule dictated by the Perl 5 release 
cycle, we're really looking for people who can devote some time to this 
between now and April 15 -- and the sooner the better.  If you have time 
available and are interested, please let me know and I'll provide more 
detailed assistance.  If you don't have the time, then set aside some 
time in the future for a different Perl community project.

Please email me if you are interested in participating in this community 
project.

Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan
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