Testing
Perl has a great testing culture. As soon as someone uploads a new distribution to PAUSE, a loose confederation of machines of different shapes and sizes known as CPAN Testers (http://testers.cpan.org) downloads, builds, and runs their test suites. This group aims to test as many modules as possible on as many possible platforms and versions of Perl as it can find.
This way, the solitary Perl author can develop on a single architecture and, by the mere act of uploading, get results for other architectures and across several versions of Perl. And it’s free! Authors can get detailed instructions on making their distribution “Testers-friendly” by reading the CPAN Testers wiki (http://wiki.cpantesters.org).
This works out for the users of CPAN modules, too. People can inspect the test reports to see how a particular module fares. David Cantrell’s CPANdeps (http://deps.cpantesters.org) presents the test reports in a matrix of platforms and Perl versions, and also provides a summary of the test reports for all module dependencies as a “probability of success” for installation.
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