There are a few CPAN modules that have excessive testing time when being installed (or reinstalled). Hint: if it takes more than a minute or two, I'm likely to be irritated.

In class today, it occurred to me that these tests could be conditional upon the presence or absence of an environment variable:

use Test::More tests => 120;

...

SKIP: {
  skip "skipping really long tests", 95 unless $ENV{ALL_TESTS};
  ... 95 tests here ...
}
[download]

That way, the developer can capture the full test suite for development and maintenance (make test ALL_TESTS=1), but as an installer, I don't have to sit through the whole thing, and I can know just how little I can get away with for a first-order "ok to install" test.

Please consider this if you're a module author. Be kind to your remote installer person.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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