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.
