Testing CPAN modules

[Jonathan Stowe]

On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 11:09 +0100, tony.x.edwardson at jpmorgan.com wrote:
> 
> Hi Tom
> 
> I don't think I worded me query very well - I'm deploying 400 CPAN
> modules to 4 Production boxes , not to 400 Production boxes.
> With regards packaging, the OS is AIX 5.2 for which there are no Perl
> module packages at present. 
> However, packaging doesn't actually solve my problem because I have to
> find some way to prove that the modules work when on the production
> machines, the fact that they all pass their test harnesses on
> development is not sufficient for the release to be approved. 
> 
> In answer to your question, "How do we deploy software to these
> servers" - there is no fixed procedure - if a package is available, we
> use that,  (I gather that on AIX this is not an easy process). 
> In this case, I am building perl on one of our development boxes using
> gcc and then creating a tarball which I am checking into source
> control. 
> This is then put live via the release mechanism here which only allows
> you to put code live from the source control system - I have no direct
> access. 
> The problem is, this system requires some form of testing to be done
> on the released code before it can be signed off and I am trying to
> find a way to do this using the test harnesses provided with each
> module given the constraints of the absence of any development tools. 
> 

The 'test harness' is only a bit more complicated than:

   perl -MTest::Harness -e'runtests(<t/*.t test.pl>'

Test::Harness is in the perl core so it is little more than copying the
test directory (t/) or the test.pl from the modules distribution
directory and running the above in the directory.

/J\