Huuuui, the first pass on NetBSD 5 for Perl 5.11
Great! I didn't do something useful, I was just smoking all the incoming changes of Perl on NetBSD 5.0_BETA and finally Perl compiled and was tested successfully on the shiny all new NetBSD 5.0_BETA. Great!
Automated smoke report for 5.11.0 patch 2008122808580844093966778821659006382813444093 smoker.pkgbox.org: Intel 686-class (i386/2 cpu) on netbsd - 5.0_BETA using cc version 4.1.3 20080704 prerelease (NetBSD nb2 20081120) smoketime 4 hours 19 minutes (average 32 minutes 26 seconds) Summary: PASS
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas to all the blog readers :) I am just rebuilding NetBSD 5.0_BETA and I will restart the bulk build for i386. That's a nice present, eh? Expect the packages soon.
My first patch for Perl ...(has been accepted)
*coughs*, ok - it's not a biggie. I was smoke testing Perl on NetBSD 5.0_BETA and noticed the failures. Hubertf and me looked around, chatted in irc and found something weird inside the hints file for NetBSD. The osversion is being tested and the match is for 1.*,2.*,3.*,4.* - hej, 5 is missing! Anyway, I corrected it, smoked it and finally I sent the bug to the perl5-porters list. I've attached a small patch to it and pointed out why the 5.* needs to be added. After a short time I got a message back telling me:
Thanks, applied as 7f98bb4e5817790bc537b480552504b79734edd5 Welcome to perl5-porters AND to smoking!Welcome to the nice Perl community. Let's see if I manage to get more patches out of pkgsrc to upstream.
trivial - but it's a nice feeling to improve free software, at least a bit References
Do you have a pony? (useless modules part I)
It's useful to have a pony. Everyone should have one. I tended to
install the shiny new Jifty webframework for it. Jifty brings in -
you've guessed it - a pony. When Jesse Vincent was asked what features
should be in Jifty he got the answer: a pony. A pony can be everything,
it's the ultimate wish of a small girl: "Daddy, can I have a pony?".
A pony is quite big and Jifty usually ends in a lot of dependencies,
there are other modules which can bring you a pony. The shiny Perl
module Acme::Magic::Pony brings a pony to your application. This module
checks for the existance of all the modules you want to use in a script,
if it finds the correct module installed it does nothing, if not - it
calls the CPAN shell to install it.
Daddy, can I have a pony?
References
A non-fixed bug never disappears
All this smoke testing of modules and Perl interpreters leads to
worthful information. Right now Perl 5.11 shows a compilation error
which is marked as build failure in the reports. I've searched around it
and I found that this is an oldie. There seems to be a problem in
including a header file which is called cdefs_elf.h. This header file
can't be compiled until cdefs.h is included first. Is this the correct
behavior? PR lib/37560 for more information. Where is the correct place
to fix it? Perl? NetBSD?
According to the ticket this is a problem with Perl and should be fixed there.
However, it shows the problems around communication with upstream. Btw, all the
reports show this error and there is one which succeed with it. Any
suggestions on a fix?
References:
- PR lib/37560 - sys/cdefs_elf.h error
- Report for Perl 5.11 on NetBSD 5.0_BETA
- Report for Perl 5.10 on NetBSD 4.0
- Report for Perl 5.11 on NetBSD 4.0
I smoke everything! (Perl)
I decided to take up my part inside the Perl community for Perl smoking,
too. All you do is to run a smoking script which downloads the lastest
but greatest Perl, compiles it and runs alot of tests. The results are
emailed back and statistics will be gathered. I got some feedback about
the CPAN testing so far - thanks for all your input. The smoke testing
is a great way to contribute to the community and to improve the overall
quality of Perl on NetBSD. If you do have a few cpu cycles, stop running
on Seti, provide the ressources to the Perl community. I working on
documenting all the stuff I am running so it'll be alot easier to start
with testing.
Btw, your help is needed badly. Right now some tests fail on NetBSD and
the overall result of the testing is FAIL (it breaks during the build).
References:
- Test::Smoke documentation
- nntp mirror for the build reports
- Example report for NetBSD 5.0_BETA
- Homepage of test-smoke.org
Fetching CPAN::Reporter information
CPAN (1.92..) has some nice new features. I wrote some entries about my
CPAN smoke testing. I showed some screenshots about the testing, however
the build information is useful on the shell, too. When you decide to
install stuff using the CPAN module, you can ask CPAN to show you
the test report about a module. Just use the nice reports function from
the CPAN module and type in the name of the module you would like to
have reported. Just start the CPAN shell by typing perl -MCPAN
-eshell or call the cpan command. Here is an example
of a typical session:
rhaen@smoker$ cpan CPAN: File::HomeDir loaded ok (v0.80) Terminal does not support AddHistory. cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.9205) ReadLine support available (maybe install Bundle::CPAN or Bundle::CPANxxl?) cpan[1]> reports Error Distribution: S/SH/SHLOMIF/Error-0.17015.tar.gz CPAN: CPAN::DistnameInfo loaded ok (v0.07) CPAN: File::Temp loaded ok (v0.21) Fetching 'http://cpantesters.perl.org/show/Error.yaml'... +PASS 5.8.9 on Linux 2.6.16.60-0.31-default (s390x-linux) +PASS 5.8.9 on Linux 2.6.16.60-0.31-default (s390x-linux-thread-multi) +PASS 5.8.9 on Freebsd 7.0-release (i386-freebsd-thread-multi-64int) *+PASS 5.10.0 on Netbsd 5.0_beta (i386-netbsd-thread-multi) +PASS 5.10.0 on Freebsd 7.0-release (i386-freebsd-thread-multi-64int) See http://cpantesters.perl.org/show/Error.html for detailsThe platform you are on is marked with an asterisk. So this module has been built and successfully passed all the tests. It's very likely that it'll install on your computer as well. Perls CPAN tools advanced over time - explore the wonders of Perl!
CPAN smoking - just started
Wheeew, it's smoking. The CPU is melting, room temperature rose and the
nice and nifty NetBSD-5 BETA box is doing CPAN smoke builds. Basically I
used a NetBSD pkgsrc packaged Perl and installed the tools for the smoke
builds by hand. I think it would be useful to have them packaged in
pkgsrc, something I will start working on at the weekend. In the
meantime my server downloads all the CPAN Perl modules and tries to
build them. After a successful build it will run the test target and
mail the results back to CPAN.
Here is such a report in a more detailed view. Follow the links to see
it. It sums up the build, lists the prerequisites and the test results.
If the tests generated an error the author of the module will be
included in the recipients list. I hope to get a few patches out of
pkgsrc this way and to provide an easy way for our users to check the
status of Perl in NetBSD.
References:
- Sample Report for NetBSD-5_BETA (Error module)
- Total Report for the Error module
- Report per Perl version
Becoming a CPAN tester
Maintaining Perl modules for NetBSD on all kind of different platforms is one thing, building all kind of modules to contribute to the Perl community is something different. Good Perl support is good for an operating system, it makes developers stay and provide them good toolchains. When NetBSD 5 will be released I want to make sure that all kind of tests have been run before. A good way to test all the different modules on CPAN is CPAN Smoketesting. Basically it means to download all the Perl modules which have been released on CPAN and try to build them and to run make test on them. This should work automatically once you fiddled out all kinds of aspects of the environment. There are manuals and tutorials, however the whole thing is hardly documented. The results are being uploaded to CPAN, the authors got notified in case of testing failures. That's a good thing, it makes things more transparent for everyone and gives a developer the chance to test his code on foreign OS. I want to help out here and there and will look into it on the next days. I want to work on their documenation, here is the first info thread :) References:
Update:Easy - a simple error in the mail configuration prevented the system from sending the result mails. This has been fixed now and I am able to smoke Perl CPAN modules. I've found another guide which is quite helpful, too - start smoking, everyone.
- Become a CPAN Tester with CPAN::Reporter
- CPAN::Testers documentation
- BinGOs Journal (best guide so far) - CPANPLUS
pkgsrc and Catalyst
Well, I maintaining alot of the Catalyst related Perl packages inside the pkgsrc tree and keep them up-to-date. I was looking for a webframework sometime ago and I found Catalyst. Catalyst is a very nice MVC webframework which is fully 2.0 compliant (don't cry BINGO now). They had a nice idea - they are running a small calendar for advent and I decided to write an article for it. Explore the worlds of modern art of Perl - go Catalyst! References:
