Latest Update - 2nd July 2008

CPAN Testers Stats - June Update - Bound For Glory

Largely thanks to David Golden, we seem to have broken all records again. David already warned me at the end of May that he was planning to top 100,000 reports in a month, and 3 weeks into June he did just that, after which he started aiming for 150,000! With 138,311 reports finally submitted, David is now our top monthly tester, with Chris and Andreas vying for second place. Although it has to said that Chris does have rather a good excuse for not meeting David's challenge last month, as his latest project, Niamh Olivia Williams, was born last Wednesday. Apparently Chris has machines prepped and ready for her to help him pass David for July ;)

Right across the board, the reports have all hit their highs, with a total of 262,817 reports being submitted during the month. The stats website suffered a little with the daily updates, although this was due to two different parsing errors that surfaced in a few reports, which have now been fixed. The daily updates now seem to be running nice and smoothly, and I'm now looking to finish off some further automation work.

Another of our top testers, Jon Allen, has also helped to identify Mac OS X versions that don't see much testing. While Leopard (the latest release) has some testing on 5.10.0 and 5.8.8, it would be beneficial to see a lot more, for those releases of the perl interpreter. Tiger is seeing the majority of testing, with 5.10.0 and 5.8.8 making up the bulk of reports, so a few more on 5.8.7 and 5.8.6 would be good to see. Lastly, Panther testing seems to concentrate on 5.8.1, 5.8.2 and 5.8.3, and would definitely benefit from more testing on later releases of Perl. Jon has written a script that I hope to adapt to provide a better breakdown for other OSs in future updates.

June also featured YAPC::NA in Chicago, where I presented "How To Be A CPAN Tester". The talk was mostly a brief introduction to CPAN Testing, with several references to the installation and configuration of the tools on the wiki, plus a list of the community websites used. The talk appeared to go down well, and at the BOF later the same day, I got a few interested parties that were looking to setup a CPAN testing box of some sort. Hopefully this also means we'll be getting another Sun machine to test with a variety of perls too. Next month Chris Williams will be giving his version of the talk at YAPC::Europe in Copenhagen.

During my talk in Chicago, I also announced that Léon Brocard, who has been looking after the CPAN Testers Reports site for several years, has handed the reins over to me. After which it seems there was a lot of interest in improving the report capabilities of the site. Gabor Szabo and Adam Kennedy had ideas for updating the site, and יובל קוג'מן (Yuval Kogman, aka nothingmuch) has also since hinted at some ideas too, so over the coming months expect some additional functionality to appear, plus further integration with some of the other CPAN Tester sites. My thanks to Léon for keeping the site going for all these years and for the major improvements he made, particularly with the use of the YUI colour charts. You can also blame him for getting me involved with CPAN Testers in the first place, after his BOF presentation in 2003 at YAPC::Europe in Paris :)

Again we had over 100 testers submitting reports last month, with 20 new addresses mapped, of which we had 12 new testers identified. In addition, with so many addresses unmatched, I reran a check through the complete set of reports to see if I could find some matches for addresses from old reports. The result was a further mapping of 48 addresses. I suspect some of the still unmatched addresses from the early days of reporting have long since fallen into disuse, so it's unlikely that I'll be able to resolve them. However, if you were a CPAN Tester, especially from 1999 to about 2003, although later is good too, please check the leader board and see if any of your old addresses appear in the list. Let me know, and I'll update the lists.

If you want to get involved in CPAN Testing, please checkout the CPAN Testers Wiki for details of how to set things up. You can also join the CPAN Testers Discussion mailing list if you need any further advice or if you have any suggestions for improving the tools or resources.

View previous updates.

The Statistics

Everyone loves statistics, and here are several more for you to have fun with. I originally produced these statistics to spot trends in any testing of CPAN that was occurring, but I also wanted to see more clearly what platforms and versions of perl were being tested. The results were rather enlightening, so I extended the analysis to look at the complete recorded history of CPAN Testers. The first productive results of this exercise was to submit patches to the CPAN::WWW::Testers and CPAN::WWW::Testers::Generator modules, that now include the Perl version and platform in the test report summaries. Hopefully the next productive results will be to inspire others to be involved with CPAN testing.

The History

The CPAN testers was conceived back in May 1998 by Graham Barr and Chris Nandor as a way to provide multi-platform testing for modules. Today over 1 million tester reports have been submitted by over 1,000 testers, who have given valuable feedback for users and authors alike.

How To Become A Tester

Whether you have a common platform or a very unusual one, you can help by testing modules you install and submitting reports. There are plenty of module authors who could use test reports and helpful feedback on their modules and distributions. If you'd like to get involved, please take a look at the CPAN Testers Wiki, and read up on who you can become a CPAN Testers with CPAN/CPAN::Reporter or CPAN::YACSmoke, how to join the cpan-testers and cpan-testers-discuss mailing lists and what happens when you start submitting your reports.

Help Refine The Stats

In creating all these statistics, it has taken a notable amount of time to match email addresses to real people. There are a significant number who aren't CPAN authors, and many who have only contributed a few reports. As a consequence, there are still many many email addresses I haven't been able to trace. If you spot an email address that you've used to send reports, please let me know, and I'll update ASAP.

The Code & The Database

Want to see the code and current database for the site, then look no further.

• The Code: cpanstats-0.44.tar.gz or cpanstats-latest.tar.gz
• The Database: cpanstats.db.gz () (MB compressed, MB uncompressed)