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.

Yesterday I announced the launch of the notification system (with very mixed reactions), part of a whole swathe of improvements planned for CPAN Testers. The next phase for the notification system is to implement a preferences website, on which authors can fine tune the alerting they wish to receive, even down to particular os, perl version, distribution and distribution version. So for example if an author wants to receive mails for their distributions, except their Acme ones, or only for those reports run on VMS, then they can. I'm not going to commit to when the preferences site will be live, as there is much work behind the scenes still yet to do, but all being well I plan to have something live in the coming months.

Since taking on the code base for CPAN-WWW-Testers-Generator and CPAN-WWW-Testers, I have been hard at work implementing many improvements for these, as well as packaging CPAN-Testers-WWW-Statistics. You may not have noticed the improvements in the database generation tools and process, but you may have noticed some of the clean ups on the Statistics site. One of these clean-ups has been to finally add an RSS feed and formalise the blog.

Another update has been to move the non-CPAN code and data to a new CPAN Testers Development site. My primary intention with this is to provide links to the data that is used or generated behind the scenes, that isn't appropriate for CPAN. However, a further intention is to provide a suitable one-hit place to find all the development links you will need if you wish to get involved in working with the CPAN Testers code base. At the moment only links to the CPAN versions are included, but eventually git/svn/cvs/whatever repositories will also be listed. This will hopefully encourage patches and the like for adding more functionality to the websites and bring us closer to CPAN Testers 2.0.

However, there is still one part of the puzzle to be unveiled, and that is the new CPAN Testers Reports website. On Monday I gave a quick preview to MiltonKeynes.pm, which gained some positive comments, and will hopefully meet with approval with everyone else (though I doubt it after the flak I've been getting over the past week) once it receives its finishing touches. The site currently builds to over 3.7GB as a static site, so the move to a dynamic site will reduce that somewhat. Lots of fixes for the static site have been implemented, and many more are still planned. Expect its public launch soon.

There is lots more planned for CPAN Testers 2.0, but much of that will be behind the scenes in the way that reports get sent to the central server. If you want to get involved and help improve CPAN Testers, please consider joining the cpan-testers-discuss mailing list. David Golden has started a Roadmap page on the wiki, so please put forward your suggestions and ideas.

Today I'm pleased to announce the launch of the CPAN Testers' "Collated Email Notification of Tester Reports for Authors Service" [1], a centralised notification system to send authors email updates for the reports, that were previously sent by testers to the authors directly. David has now updated Test-Reporter to suppress the sending of mails to authors, and the CPAN Tester community are currently upgrading their environments with the latest version. As such the current direct mails should now tail off, with the new notification system taking over.

Following some heated discussions last week, part of the plans for CPAN Testers 2.0 have been brought forward. As much of the data recording and presentation is already fairly centralised, it has long been planned to make the author notificatons more centralised to provide more consistent reporting. Due to some very heated threads recently, David Golden and myself decided we should look at putting a centralised email alerting system into place sooner rather than later. David has been looking at alerting testers to broken environments, old CPAN Testers tools and badly formed reports, which will hopefully be live soon, while I have taken on the first part of the whole author notification and preferences system.

The prototype for alerting authors went live this lunchtime (UK time), though if you haven't received an email yet, don't fret it is just likely that none of your distributions have been tested since Saturday in order to receive the mails. As this is just the first part of the full preferences system, I've had to set some defaults. These have been set to notify authors of the FAIL reports, which are the FIRST instance of a distribution/platform/perl combination. Currently all the known PAUSE ids have been entered into the database with these defaults, apart from a few authors who have expressed other default preferences. If you do not wish to receive these alerts, or would like to alter the preferences, please send me an email (barbie[at]cpan.org) and I'll make the updates as requested.

The notification system will run once a day and collate a list of the links to the reports via the web interface on the NNTP server. As such, you will no longer receive huge reports in your inbox, but at most just one email a day containing a list of links to your reports. You can then view them at your leisure. If you have any problems with the notifications themselves, please let me know, and I would welcome any suggestions for improvements. I may not be able to implement them straight away (and may already have some on my TODO list), but please feel free to email me privately, comment here, or join the cpan-testers-discuss mailing list and join the dicussions.

[1] If you can think of a suitable word beginning with 'L' to replace 'Service' let me know ;)

This month we hit the 2 millionth post to cpan-testers, thanks to Chris Williams. I congratulated him after his talk in Copenhagen, but he was more relieved to find out that the report itself was a PASS :) I still need to check which was the 2 millionth verified report, but I suspect Chris will claim that too. With such a high volume of reports, it's getting more urgent to move to something other than SMTP. There have been further discussions about updating the transport method and hopefully there should be some movement on that during the latter part of the year. In the meantime, if you're interested in getting involved in the way CPAN Testers gets reported in the future, feel free to join cpan-testers-discuss@perl.org, and add your thoughts.

Having taken over the code that runs the CPAN Testers Reports website, I have been hard at work behind the scenes updating all the code that generates the database and websites. As the CPAN Testers Statistics site worked from an enhanced version of the database, the first hurdle has been to merge the two and ensure both websites can be rebuilt from the same database. Despite a few hiccups with the NNTP server, that part of the process has gone very well. As a consequence several code releases of CPAN-WWW-Testers-Generator have already hit CPAN. The code for the Reports and Statistics site is currently being packaged and will be released soon too. The two sites meanwhile are being heavily tested with the new database, and again all seems to be running smoothly. For some thoughts into my plans for the future of the Reports site, see my use.perl posting.

Last month featured an excursion by many testers to Copenhagen, for the annual YAPC::Europe Perl Conference. Chris Williams presented 'Rough Guide to CPAN Testing', and we held a CPAN Testers BOF at the end of the first day. We had several people along to discuss several aspects of CPAN testing, and Adam Kennedy's PITA idea also got a lot of interest. After the BOF we managed to get a group photo of some of the testers. Next year I hope it will be an even bigger collection of testers :)

Both at the end of Chris' talk and during the first set of Lightning Talks, JJ and I announced that with the support of Birmingham.pm, we would be hosting the second QA Hackathon in Birmingham. We have already spoken to several people, who we hope will be able to attend, and we're hoping a few others will also be able to get involved too. More details will be announced in due course, but expect more CPAN Testers work to be involved in the hackathon.

Again we had over 100 testers submitting reports last month, with 49 new addresses mapped, of which we had 16 new testers identified. Once I've got the current work out of the way, my plan is to graph the number of new and core testers we see each month. I'm interested to see what effect the promotion of CPAN Testers at major events, or significant online promotions, have on the uptake of new testers. After that I hope to look at the platforms tested in a little more depth.

While trawling the back catalogue of articles on the NNTP server, in order to verify the database was building correctly, I uncovered a couple of posts from Brian King; FAQ First Draft Thread and FAQ Second Draft Thread. Interesting to see we still have the same basic principals of CPAN Testing now :)