If you haven't come across QuestHub, you might want to take a look at the Perl Realm. It's essentially a TODO list of tasks and projects, which can earn you points, if you like to game these sorts of things. There are several stencils to help get you started, and in particular there are now several relating to CPAN Testers. If you're new to the Perl or CPAN Testers community, and want to contribute in some way, the stencils are an ideal starting point. Some are technical, others are more social, but all are to the benefit of Perl. Neil Bowers pointed me to the site in the first place, thanks to his post Make me do some work, via Questhub!, which in turn drew inspiration from a previous CPAN Testers Summary post.

Last month the CPAN::Changes Kwalitee Service saw 40% of CPAN meet the CPAN::Changes::Spec. In the past month, and thanks to Neil and his stencils on QuestHub, that figure has risen to 41%, and is continuing to improve. While the specification is no way necessary to upload your distribution to CPAN, it does help to have some form of standard format for Changes files. As a consequence, Neil Bowers submitted a ticket to include a suggestion in the Perl documentation, which has now been approved and patched.

Reini Urban posted Smoking CPAN in one line on blogs.perl. Although we would recommend more conventional ways of smoking CPAN, this one-liner certainly does the job. Reini had a specific test he was looking, at, but the outcome has been to raise tickets on several distributions, many of which have already been fixed. Testing for specific bugs is not usually what CPAN Testers is about, but in this instance it proved a very productive effort.

After reading several posts and emails over the past few years, and particularly one in the past few months, I felt a post was needed to provide a bit of clarity. There are many ways to get involved with CPAN Testers, aside from being a tester. If you wish to help improve the tools and websites, feel free to take a look at the repos and see how you can help. Let us know your ideas on the mailing list, and by all means ask for guidance and advice there too. CPAN Testers is continually evolving, but it does take time.

The Admin site is coming along. The original framework has been in place for sometime, as it was originally designed before we had CPAN Testers 2.0 in place, but I've had to redesign some of the work with accessing and indexing tester emails. You can follow my progress on QuestHub, as I complete various aspects of coding and testing. A more public repo will also appear soon.

On the mailing list last month, Serguei Trouchelle highlighted some unusual behavior with a tester using CPANPLUS. Chris picked this up and it seems some of the instructions on the Wiki for testing CPANPLUS might not be as complete as they need to be. Hopefully we can clean these up soon, so new testers can ensure their test environments are working correctly. A few people emailed me to say the CPAN Testers Reports site was down. Every so often several backend process are all running at once, and with a few extra Apache processes on top, the disk I/O can be a bit traumatic. As such the websites are usually the first things to suffer. I'm looking at moving some of the websites around soon, to hopefully reduce the impact.

Olivier Mengué posted that he thought the YAML files that are retrieved from the Reports site were invalid. We use YAML::XS, and the real file it reads from is actually a JSON file. The probalem seems to be with the YAML module, as it requires a final newline character at the end of the file. The results of YAML::XS are sent straight out in the HTTP response, and are not written to disk, and don't include a final newline character. I'm not aware of this being a requirement in the YAML spec, so would recommend people switching to YAML::XS or YAML::Syck if they wish to read the YAML files from the Reports site. Or you could just request the JSON file directly.

This week is YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev. Sadly I'm not there, but I hope everyone who is making the most of the event. Four talks specifically about testing are being presented, so please check them out if you can.

We're now up to 33 million reports submitted, which is great. But it does means some spring clean is still on going to keep the disk space down. The databases combined now take up around 610GB of storage, and the websites on the main server (including CPAN and BACKPAN) take up another 150GB. I'll be looking at upgrading our disk allocation soon, but it never hurts to do a bit of spring cleaning. The compression of reports is still underway and over 16 million of them are now compressed. More updates for you next month.