In the final moments of the QA Hackathon at the weekend, this report came through the CPAN Testers system to mark some notable progress to the future of CPAN Testers.

The report itself might not look too different from any other report submitted in recent times, except there a two significant differences if you know what to look for. The first is a little more visible and is the fact that the report was created by cpanminus and submitted by cpanminus-reporter.

Breno G. de Oliveira (GARU) started work on a CPAN Testers client for cpanminus last year, asked lots of questions during the 2012 QA Hackathon in Paris, and completed the work this weekend at the 2013 QA Hackathon in Lancaster. So those who have switched to using cpanminus, you can now run the cpanm-reporter script to process the build log from cpanminus and submit reports.

However, while this is a great step forward, the not so obvious change is probably even more significant. This report marks the first ever report to be submitted using the all new CPAN::Testers::Common::Client. This takes a lot of the core analysis of the report and environment out of the CPAN smoker clients and brings it all together, so that any current or new smoker can make use of it. This will mean as smoker clients are upgraded we will start to get more consistency between reports, and all the useful information needed can be seen regardless of whether the report was tested via cpan, cpanplus or cpanminus.

But this still isn't the full story. There is an even bigger significance with the use of CPAN::Testers::Common::Client, and that is it submits the report broken down into its component parts as meta data. This now means that although a plain text report is available, the individual items of data, such as prerequisites and versions, are now submitted separately and are stored as facts within the Metabase.

This last part is significant because in the future it will allow us to do more interesting analysis on the reports, and hopefully provide more information to authors to understand why some tests fail and others pass.

Many thanks to Garu for finally completing all the work he has been doing over the last year, and congratulations for being the first to submit a report with the new client engine.

At the QA Hackathon in Lancaster, Garu and I were discussing which distribution to test. We looked at the distributions with no reports and spotted Task-BeLike-SARTAK. Garu thought he would to be like SARTAK, but unfortunately we hit a problem with a prerequisite, which wouldn't create a report, so we ended up picking IO-Prompt-Tiny. Thankfully this went through without a hitch and arrived on the reports website a couple of hours later.