CPAN dependencies and test results checker

After a discussion on the perl-qa list, and being blessed with a few hours free time, I wrote a shiny thing, which, given a module name on the CPAN, will find all its dependencies, and their dependencies yea even unto the Nth generation, and display a nice shiny report on their CPAN-testers results.

I expect it to be useful for authors trying to decide what to depend on (you don't want to depend on stuff that itself has fragile dependencies) and also for people trying to figger out why the hell some random module won't install.

To see half the CPAN, try pointing it at Angerwhale.

update: it now calculates the likelihood of a trouble-free install, and has been made much faster by having a local copy of the CPAN testers database and moving to mod_perl

Comment on CPAN dependencies and test results checker

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Re: CPAN dependencies and test results checker by Burak (Chaplain) on Aug 04, 2007 at 20:19 UTC
Nice :) But, if a module has only PASSes, either don't use "red.png" or do some adjustment in your display code. I can still see a red vertical line at the right end of the bar in Opera & IE (Firefox is OK).	[reply]
Re: CPAN dependencies and test results checker by pKai (Priest) on Aug 05, 2007 at 17:56 UTC
Nice, I can see that it most probably is a Perl cgi: http://cpandeps.cantrell.org.uk/index.pl. ~~Being able to figure out how it works by browsing some source code would be even nicer.~~ Update: Got the source code link on second view. :-/	[reply]
Re: CPAN dependencies and test results checker by moritz (Cardinal) on Aug 06, 2007 at 08:42 UTC
Very nice. On the result page you could add links to cpan, not only to cpantesters. Perl 6 in German	[reply]
Re: CPAN dependencies and test results checker by aufflick (Deacon) on Aug 07, 2007 at 00:19 UTC
Very nice! I'm confused by the pass/fail numbers though. LWP shows 20 passes and 19 fails in your system http://cpandeps.cantrell.org.uk/?module=LWP but only 1 fail (and 22 passes) on CPANTS http://cpantesters.perl.org/show/libwww-perl.html. Do you run your own tests? That would be a lot of work and possibly unrepresentative of multiple platforms. I would suggest scraping the results from CPANTS and aggregating all platforms of the latest version (don't know if there's some sort of XML feed of that).	[reply]
Re^2: CPAN dependencies and test results checker by DrHyde (Prior) on Aug 07, 2007 at 10:13 UTC
It has cached the results for what was the most recent version on the CPAN testers website on Sunday evening. Items stay in the cache for a week. I would be delighted to accept a patch to make it keep up-to-date while still not running like a stunned slug.	[reply]
Re^3: CPAN dependencies and test results checker by aufflick (Deacon) on Aug 08, 2007 at 02:01 UTC
That's surprising that CPANTS would have 19 fails for LWP on Sunday and only 2 on Tuesday.	[reply]
Re^4: CPAN dependencies and test results checker by DrHyde (Prior) on Aug 08, 2007 at 09:35 UTC
Re: CPAN dependencies and test results checker by holli (Abbot) on Dec 14, 2007 at 18:31 UTC
This is really handy. ++ I think I have an idea that could improve it. Also outputting a "least-fuss-at-top" or "leaves first" list of the modules would help to keep better control of a long installation process. You could first install the modules with no dependencies, then the ones that relied on them, then the ones that relied on them, etc very easily. This is true for the cpan shell which ~~sometimes~~ often doesn't recognize a failed install and keeps going with the result of mass test failings and further failed installs. Let alone wacky installation environments like webhosting and no shell-access. It would be really nice to have a checklist to go bottom up. holli, /regexed monk/	[reply] [d/l]


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