kentcowgill.org/blog

Ok, to be fair - it's really not a problem I have with CPAN.

A month or so ago, I won a copy of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook as a 'door prize' at a Chicago Perl Mongers meeting. I devoured it within a few days, reading it during my daily commute.

Of special interest was the section on creating a test harness (or custom status report) for testing output by making use of Test::Harness::Straps . This was very cool because I had tried to get Test::TAP::HTMLMatrix to install on my Mac earlier this year only to be met with failing tests, or failing tests of dependencies. I don't recall, but I was really bummed. Figuring out the issue was beyond me at the time - I looked into it, but didn't have a ton of time, and I couldn't quickly see the issue.

Anyhow, today I had a bit a inspiration to make use of the example code from the book and see if I couldn't use it to produce some fancy HTML output of my own to give an at-a-glance status of tests I had run, similar in nature to the cool Pugs Smoke Reports . So, I whipped open my copy of Perl Testing , typed in the example code, ran it against some tests I had recently written at work, fixed the bits that were broken (by consulting the documentation for Test::Harness::Results )... run, view, tweak, repeat ad nauseum.

I finally got something fairly close to approximating those cool Pugs reports. But there were some big differences - which I couldn't figure out how to implement quickly (after all - the rest of the development of this parser was really quick and easy) - and I was running short on supplemental time. I actually thought it might be beneficial to take another look at HTMLMatrix and see if I could tweak that a bit.

I took a look in my .cpan cache directory, but it wasn't still there. So I fire up my CPAN shell and try to install it (knowing full well it will fail, but my fingers are trained to type install MODULE).

And before I know it, it's successfully installed.