[sf-perl] [meeting] Hudson and Perl - why?

[Tatsuhiko Miyagawa]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 3:48 PM, James Briggs <james at actionmessage.com> wrote:

> I've worked as a build and release engineer on compiler projects with CI
> tools like Buildbot. There was a clear benefit from continuous builds
> with multiple programmers modifying a large C code base.
>
> But since scripting languages don't have a compile or link stage, I'm a
> little puzzled at the utility of Hudson with Perl projects.

Continuous integration is not only about the compiling, but also
running unit tests.

> I guess you could have Hudson run perl -c on each source file, and run
> the tests.

Yes, but you don't even need to do perl -c, since if your code doesn't
compile then your tests should obviously fail. You can have a test
that uses tools like Test::UseAllModules to make sure all the .pm
files in your application actually compiles.

> Anybody care to share some examples of using a CI tool with Perl where
> there was a benefit to developers?

There's a plugin for Perl's Test::Harness that supports JUnit output
which you can inject into Hudson. You can see all the reports and get
notification when one of the commit breaks your test suite. Pretty
useful.

-- 
Tatsuhiko Miyagawa