Still the bug(s) needs fixing and its understandable that prolific CPAN / opensource authors may get bogged down having to find time to fix bugs in heavily used projects.

Fortunate for me I only have a few CPAN modules at this time and I doubt they’re heavily used! Even more lucky that in this case the bug was only related to testing on Windows.

So if you’ve written software then you have bugs! Thus you need a good issue tracking system to keep a handle on things. Luckily CPAN comes with its own Request Tracker (RT) from Best Practical. My first reported bug came via this last week.

You can change your CPAN module page to point to any other issue tracker should you wish this (see part about amending your meta tag and also my old post on repo link). But I’m more than happy to go with RT and there maybe good reasons for doing this because it maybe better integrated into the CPAN toolchain (my PAUSE login worked with RT).

BTW, my testing with Windows issue is the usual pathname and EOL delimiter differences. Just because it leaves your box with 100% passes it would be silly to expect it arrives at someone else’s box the same

/I3az/

PS. Related references:

• CPAN Smoke Testing: An unsung hero

• Acme::URL
• PerlX::QuoteOperator

The first one you is just a small xmas cracker that you will already know about from my “bare URL” post from last week. Just pull, enjoy for a little while and then chuck away like most xmas cracker toys

The second one is a tad similar (ie. Devel::Declare) but with a much more sympathetic syntax by allowing you to create new Quote-Like Operators in Perl with Perl.

For a good end product exemplar have a look at PerlX::QuoteOperator::URL included with the distribution:

use PerlX::QuoteOperator::URL 'qh';

my $content = qh{ http://transfixedbutnotdead.com/ };

There is no scary parsing going on with this example. PerlX::QuoteOperator / Devel::Declare simply hits the ‘qh’ keyword and converts it to:

qh qq{ http://transfixedbutnotdead.com/ }

And ‘qh’ is a subroutine with a ($) prototype. So nothing too sinister (unless you really do abhor subroutine prototypes!), just a simple macro which gives the appearance that we have new quote-like operators.

Certainly an interesting concept to be able to produce new quote-like operators in Perl. So hopefully PerlX::QuoteOperator might find its way under a few xmas trees

Merry Xmas & happy St. Stephen’s day to everyone.

/I3az/

PS. I chose the PerlX::* because gugod as already provided some wonderful Devel::Declare Perl extending modules under this namespace. I feel its in the same vein so hopefully a good place for it to live.

“you learn something new every day”

My last upload of MooseX::SingletonMethod produced a funny in the module documentation (POD) on CPAN. It was showing the same POD in both modules (MX::SM & MX::SM::Role).

And not only was it showing MX::SM::Role POD in both but when you selected source you would only see code for MX::SM!?

How very odd?? (and u can still see this when u click above 0.02 link).

Here is an important snippet of how the modules / POD looked… first for MooseX::SingletonMethod:

package MooseX::SingletonMethod;

...

1;

__END__

=head1 NAME

MooseX::SingletonMethod - Moose with Singleton Method facility.

...

and for MooseX::SingletonMethod::Role

package MooseX::SingletonMethod::Role;
...
  
1;

__END__

=head1 NAME

MooseX::SingletonMethod - Role providing Singleton Method option

...

Spot the mistake?

The last line shown in above module should be….

MooseX::SingletonMethod::Role - Role providing Singleton Method option

Opps… missed off the ::Role part

I thought the CPAN docs were picked up from and assigned via package declaration… obviously not! Also the POD coverage tests didn’t spot anything either (perhaps it might have done if I completely foobar the POD name! )

Anyway… all’s well that ends well

/I3az/

Still having posted my last little ditty on having role attached to Moose I thought I make some slight amendments to MooseX::SingletonMethod module to pull this slightly annoying thorn from my paw.

Version 0.02 will soon be on CPAN and now works either of these ways:

package Baz;
use MooseX::SingletonMethod;
...
no MooseX::SingletonMethod;
1;

or as a role:

package Baz;
use Moose;
with 'MooseX::SingletonMethod::Role';
...
no Moose;
1;

Hate to change API but MX::SM is only a a few weeks old so I’m hopeful that the hordes of users that use this module will understand

/I3az/

Here is the synopsis from the pod:

package Baz;
use Moose;
with 'MooseX::SingletonMethod::Role';
no Moose;

package main;
my $baz = Baz->new;
my $foo = Baz->new;

# add singleton method called "baz" just to $baz and not to Baz class
$baz->add_singleton_method( baz => sub { 'baz!' } ); 

say $baz->baz;   # => 'baz!'
say $foo->baz;   # ERROR: Can't locate object method "baz"....

MooseX is the namespace for adding extensions around Moose. Its the playground of future Moose features where modules get torn, beaten and bruised in a development rite of passage.

It would one day be nice to see MooseX::SingletonMethod features grow up and become part of standard Moose family

MooseX::SingletonMethod can also be found in these exotic areas of the web:

• on GitHub
• on Ohloh
• and on FreshMeat

/I3az/

PS. While sticking my flag into the MooseX::SingletonMethod namespace I noticed the following module by Simon Cozens:

• Class-SingletonMethod

I’m amazed this as passed me by especially has I first came to understand Singleton Methods from Simon’s excellent “Advanced Perl Programming” book. Just shows you how deep and diverse the CPAN universe is!

Update: Code now uses MX::SM::Role

Actually thats not totally true because I do use search.cpan.org but via CPANTools which provides a nice suggest dropdown as you type in the search textbox.

Another place I occasionally go to is KobeSearch but I prefer the standard CPAN look (a true design classic IMHO) to the uwinnipeg.ca one.

For something really shiny have a look at CPANTools Beta

/I3az/

Update: Nearly forgot this excellent custom Google search. Also note there is also a Perl custom search.

So i checked my Google Reader settings and it had this strange RSS address…

http://unknownplace.org/cpanrecent/rss

Where did I get this from? Or did Google Reader insert this in at some point?? All very strange???

The site in question says its down for maintenance. Anyway I’ve updated my settings to use search.cpan.org RSS feed at….

• http://search.cpan.org/recent

Which translates into this feed….

http://search.cpan.org/uploads.rdf

Now happily seeing new uploads to CPAN

/I3az/

Yes it is new and I wasn’t the first to spot it: hanekomu’s Perl blog: Metadata on search.cpan.org

Hanekomu shows how to implement it in Module::Install. And Alexandr Ciornii comment points to how it can be done in Module::Build.

This is what you need to do in Module::Build (see meta_merge part):

use strict;
use warnings;
use Module::Build;

my $builder = Module::Build->new(
    module_name         => 'Builder',
    license             => 'perl',
    dist_author         => 'Barry Walsh <draegtun@cpan.org>',
    dist_version_from   => 'lib/Builder.pm',
    build_requires => {
        'Test::More' => 0,
        'Carp'       => 0,
    },
    add_to_cleanup      => [ 'Builder-*' ],
    create_makefile_pl  => 'traditional',

    meta_merge => {
      resources => {
          bugtracker => 'http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?Dist=Builder',
          repository  => 'http://github.com/draegtun/builder/tree/master'
      }
    },
);

$builder->create_build_script();

Running “./Build distmeta” produces the correct META.yml

/I3az/

I recently implemented a small feature in my Builder module and CPAN currently informs me that my test suite as passed 63 times, failed on 7 occasasions and returned an unknown status 3 times. Here’s the current breakdown of the smoke testing matrix of these different versions of Perl & OS’es the Bulder test suite as been run on.

http://www.cpantesters.org/show/Builder.html#Builder-0.02

NB. you will probably need to select 0.02 now that I’ve uploaded new versions of Builder

From this I can see that there is a problem with one of my tests when running on Perl 5.6.*…..

http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/2009/01/msg2976740.html

The culprit was this bit of code in my builder_xml_output.t test…

  my $got;
  open my $fh, '>', \$got or die $!; 

That second line creates a filehandle $fh which writes to an in memory file held in the scalar $got.
This allows me to capture output like STDOUT and perform tests on it.

After a bit of Googling I found that this feature was introduced with PerlIO which came with Perl 5.8. So hence test failure on Perl 5.6 ;-(

Solutions? Well I could just make sure only Perl 5.8 is used by placing the following at the top of my modules…

    use 5.008;

But hey that isn’t very community spirited of me ;-( And anyway there’s nothing in the Builder code that stops it working on
Perl 5.6 its just that “in memory” test line that 5.6 doesn’t like.

OK then I could just skip the tests on Perl 5.6 by amending my builder_xml_output.t like so….

    use Test::More;
    
    if ( $[ < 5.008 ) {
        plan skip_all => 'Cannot test before Perl 5.8';
    }
    else {
        plan tests => 2;
    }

Seems painless enough. But it does feel like i’m sweeping the problem under the carpet a little bit!

So after a bit more Googling I found a couple of better solutions but plumped for IO::Scalar (part of IO::Stringy). I downloaded the IO::Stringy source code folder straight from CPAN and into Builder’s test directory under “lib” and amended my builder_xml_output.t file like so…

    use Test::More tests => 2;
    use Builder;

    # local test library
    use lib 't/lib';
    use IO::Scalar;

    my $got;  
    my $fh = IO::Scalar->new( \$got ); 

    .... tests as before ....

Now test works on Perl 5.6 and above. Job done!

/I3az/

References:

• http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/open.html
• http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=398587
• http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=302088
• http://search.cpan.org/dist/IO-stringy/

 http://drnicwilliams.com/2008/12/05/my-rubygems-development-tools-and-workflow/

/I3az/