[pm-h] April Talk suggestion: perlall

[Reini Urban]

I have several talk topics, but I think App::perlall is good for April.

Introducing App::perlall, a better perlbrew and testing tool

perlall does something like perlbrew, creating perl's for various
versions and with various features
just the sane way. I.e. if possible it uses the Configure defaults and
does not need messing with
PATH and PERL5LIB and allows having several parallel global perls at once.

With all these perls - and more perls created like this in vm's - it
allows easy testing and
maintenance of your perls.
This way you don't rely on cpantesters to get back with reports on
crazy versions,
perl features or platforms, you test it by yourself before you upload
it to CPAN.

.e.g
cd Perl/MyModule
perlall maketest

does
for $p in /usr/local/bin/perl5*
  do
  make clean
  $p Makefile.PL # or Build.PL
  make
  make test | tee log.test-$(basename $p)
done

"perlall testvm" copies your perl module in cwd to all vm's and performs
"perlall maketest" there and copies the log files back.
"perlall do" runs commands for all your perls.

I describe my environment (kvm setup, building tricky perls esp. with
windows, ...)
and show several useful examples and utils, esp. with the logfiles, which are
like your private copy of cpantesters reports.
-- 
Reini Urban
http://cpanel.net/   http://www.perl-compiler.org/