goran.hultgren at bluefish.se wrote:
> 
> (damn is the list active now...)
> 
> Ned Konz <ned at bike-nomad.com> wrote:
> > That said, I rather like the new CPANPlus functionality that the Perl
> > community has: if you load a module from CPAN that has unit tests,
> > the tests are run. If the tests fail, CPANPlus asks if you want to
> > send bug reports to CPAN (or somewhere; I'm not sure where they go).
> > If you agree, the bug reports are both stored on a server, available
> > via a web interface, and sent via email to the maintainer.
> >
> > As a CPAN author, these reports have been helpful from time to time in
> > detecting problems common to a particular configuration.
> >
> > I'd like to see this (optional) ability for those packages that
> > provide tests. And I'd encourage package maintainers/authors to
> > actually write tests (not that I have any for my packages, of
> > course...)
> 
> I agree this would be very nice - Michael has also mailed me about this.
> The SSTCPW is probably to just add another url called "Download tests
> url" or something. Optional of course.

I worry about this becoming a separate downloadable item.  It seems that
Ned is saying that the "option" here is for the author/maintainer to put
tests in, and not for the user to determine if they get them or not.

If I were maintaining a package and went to the bother of writing tests,
I wouldn't be keen to provide help until I had some feedback on whether
the tests had run successfully or not. Some sort of "sanity" level tests
that ran automatically after installation would seem to be ideal. This
seems to be the scenario that Ned described in CPANPlus.

The trick would be, to have a mechanism to run a short and unobtrusive
set of "sanity" tests, and also have the ability to run a longer more
comprehensive set of "debugging" tests.

Steve Gilbert