This coming weekend, 12th-14th April will be the 6th annual QA Hackathaon. Once again returning to the UK, and will be hosted by the folks at NorthWestEngland.pm, in Lancaster. There will be several CPAN Testers in attendance, and hopefully several CPAN Testers related projects that will feature some attention. However, the event is much bigger than CPAN Testers, and there are plenty of projects involving testing, CPAN, the installation toolchain and others. If you're not attending, but would still like to help over the weekend, join the #perlqa IRC channel and let people know your available. With so many projects being worked on, additional coding help from remote hands are often very welcome.

March ended up being a slightly quieter month on the mailing list. Bo Johansson answered his own beginners questions, which I aim to put on the wiki at some point, unless anyone else gets their first. Chris Marshall asked if we were able to speed up the report feedback for PDL. Unfortunately, this is something that is dependent on a number of things, not least the speed of processing all the reports coming in. There were some issues last month, which have been (or are being) fixed, but the general speed of processing could do with improving. Disk I/O is now the bottleneck for most operations, so I'm looking at ways we can improve that. However, I would like to emphasise that the current processes run automated with very little manual intervention. Fast tracking reports for a particular distribution is not something the system is designed to do. If the process is running too slow for you, then by all means have a look at the code and suggest ways to improve it further. Alceu Rodrigues de Freitas Junior asked about distroprefs, which adds to Bo Johansson's beginners questions, and was answered by Steffen Schwigon, which again I'll be looking to add those to the wiki.

We're fast approaching the 30 million mark for number of reports submitted, but I suspect we'll have to wait until after the QA Hackathon for when it's submitted.

We have some news in the pipeline for CPAN Testers, and once we've had a chance to discuss the details at the QA Hackathon, we'll let you folks know about it all. If you can't make the QA Hackathon, remember you can always join the IRC channel, or even spend the weekend writing code. More next month.