Latest Update - 4th August 2008

CPAN Testers Stats - July Update - The Times They Are A-Changin'

First off an apology. It seems that I used a legitimate email address in a rant back last year, about the use of tester email addresses. At the time, the address didn't appear to be real and had given the impression that the address was being used as a spamtrap. The owner of the address has since contacted me to inform me that it is real, and that it doesn't get used as a spamtrap. So my sincere apologies to Rob for casting doubt on his email address. However, the address in question had caused confusion, so Rob has kindly altered the address he now sends from, so that authors can feel more comfortable about sending any queries to him. Many thanks to Rob for this.

At the beginning of the month, I launched a new domain for CPAN Testers, cpantesters.org. The new domain will hopefully prove more helpful in remembering all the sites used in the CPAN Testers family of sites, and maybe even start including a whole bunch of new ones. In order to make it even more easier to find other sites, linking between the sites with a standard dropdown is now planned, thanks to the suggestions of a few people. The reports site is currently receiving an update and will be rsync'ing to the public site soon.

August sees many of us here in Europe heading to Copenhagen, for the annual YAPC::Europe Perl Conference. On the first day of the event, on Wednesday 13th August, Chris Williams will be presenting 'Rough Guide to CPAN Testing', with a CPAN Testers BOF planned at the end of the day, so be sure to come along to find out more. I'm also hoping to add to my collection of photos of CPAN Testers, so please make sure you come and say hello to me during the conference if you are a CPAN Tester.

As mentioned last month, Leon has given me the go ahead to update the code behind the scenes for the data collection and creation of the reports site. The first part of the switch over was to merge the code that does the data collection, with the previously forked code that is currently used by the Statistics site and CPAN Dependencies site. When I forked, there were a few fields that weren't previously being recorded that were needed (e.g. the tester email address) and a few that weren't used by the stats site that were dropped. Rather than having two separate systems it makes sense to merge these changes. Plus in the last month or so, I've picked up on reports that were sent in Base64 or Quoted-Printable that were previously not being record properly. There are some further changes, such as the fact that the stats database also parses the UPLOAD articles, and a whole bunch of new tests, which have resulted in quite a nicely packaged little distribution. Before launching it on the world, I'm running it in by generating the database from scratch for all articles. Originally I was going to drop the creation of the articles database, which is held locally, but decided to keep it, as it makes look ups a lot quicker. However, it's currently over 7GB and is still not half of the way through the rebuild! The lastest complete stats database is just over 400MB, and is much more manageable. Thankfully disk space isn't an issue yet, but as a consequence I've made the creation of the articles database optional. Assuming anyone else is mad enough to try and generate this stuff ;)

This time next month, I hope to having all the CPAN Testers sites running off the same database, and will hopefully have the updated reports site online for all. Thanks again to everyone for the patches, ideas and support. It's much appreciated.

Again we had over 100 testers submitting reports last month, with 43 new addresses mapped, of which we had 7 new testers identified. After David Golden's magnificent effort last month, his bots have settled down now to a more sedate pace. As a consequence Chris has once again taken the top spot this month, and has even posted his highest number of reports in a single month. No doubt he's been getting his daughter to help out while he's been at work ;)

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-0.46.tar.gz or cpanstats-latest.tar.gz
• The Database: cpanstats.db.gz (1970/01/01) (83MB compressed, 0MB uncompressed)