NEILB's Blog

This is a review of 2016's QA Hackathon, based on feedback from attendees, sponsors, the organisers, and anyone else who chooses to pass comment. The goal is to make next year's event better and to help next year's organisers. Note that there may well be conflict between comments.

At the QAH this year we had another discussion about the River of CPAN: what's been done since last year, and what we should do to keep things moving forward. These are the notes from that discussion, and some of the things that happened after the discussion.

Prior to the QAH I kicked off a discussion about the name of the event on the cpan-workers mailing list. At the QAH itself some of us got together to talk about it some more. Here I'll summarise both of those discussions.

Andreas König and I have been working to remove the modulelist permissions from the PAUSE database. At the QA Hackathon we worked through the remaining cases, where relevant reviewing them with RJBS, and most of them were removed on the last day of the QAH. Following the QAH we've resolved the last handful, so there are no longer any 'm' permissions in 06perms.txt. This means that the relevant parts of PAUSE can be removed, and a number of modules can be simplified.

The QA Hackathon (QAH) is a chance to spend 4 days with thirty or so other people who care about the CPAN toolchain. I went with a list of things I wanted to work on, but spent a lot of my time working on other things that came up during the QAH. I've come back with my batteries recharged, fired up for another year.

This is a write-up of some ideas that Tux and I bounced round following the CPAN River discussions at the QAH. When doing dev releases of dists that are "up the river", look for changes in the CPAN Testers results of downstream dists to see if you've had a knock-on effect. This could be automated in a 'river smoke tester'.