News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why I Use Perl: Reliability. Parent comment

Re:Why I Use Perl: Reliability by Goladus on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @08:56PM (#4040817)
I once had a large CPAN dependency install fail because one of the modules' tests included an http request to a 3rd party website which happened to be down that day. I wanted to strangle that developer when I finally tracked down the error (it wasn't failing with an obvious error that would let me easily recognize what was happening, I had to read the code itself). That is going a bit too far with the testing, I think.

And though I admit the culture is great overall, that does seem to be my experience with CPAN. You never know what you're going to get. It's like that to some degree with every language but with CPAN there's so much trust in the system it can be harder to identify and filter out the lesser quality stuff.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why I Use Perl: Reliability by shaggyfrog on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @09:00PM (#4040828)
Definitely sounds like a bad test. Unless there's a specific reason for the test to have an external dependency like that, the test harness could always bring up the (HTTP) service locally before it runs.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why I Use Perl: Reliability by cytzol on Wednesday May 30, 2012 @03:37AM (#4041821)
IIRC, the correct protocol with network testing is to prompt the user first that it's going to connect to another host, so they can skip the tests if there's something wrong with their network (or the site on the other end).

The other way to do it is to start an HTTP server locally and use that (which is what WWW::Mechanize does)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why I Use Perl: Reliability by jleader on Thursday May 31, 2012 @01:54PM (#4049365)
Prompting the user seems like a bad thing for an automated test to do!

The whole point of automating tests is so you can run them unattended: at install time, or under a continuous integration system after code check-ins, or for git pickaxe to find which change caused a bug, or whenever else you want to confirm that a whole lot of code still works as intended.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why I Use Perl: Reliability by adrianhoward on Wednesday May 30, 2012 @04:46AM (#4041961)
That is going a bit too far with the testing, I think

Agreed :-)

And though I admit the culture is great overall, that does seem to be my experience with CPAN. You never know what you're going to get. It's like that to some degree with every language but with CPAN there's so much trust in the system it can be harder to identify and filter out the lesser quality stuff.

There are lots of nice tools that help with that though. https://metacpan.org/, http://cpantesters.org/, http://cpanratings.perl.org/, etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]