CPANTS is an acronym for CPAN Testing Service. The goals of the CPANTS project are to provide some sort of quality measure (called "Kwalitee") and lots of metadata for all distributions on CPAN.

Please take all the information presented here with a grain of salt. The methods used to test the distributions are a bit flakey, and some of the Kwalitee indicators are still subjects of discussions (which should happen on the perl-qa list).

Why don't you...

• Search for authors or distributions.
• Take a look at the various reports generated at this site.
• Admire the top gamers of the CPANTS game.
• Download the latest CPANTS data as a SQLite DB from here

  cpants_all.db.gz

News

2008-04-09: QA Hackathon Achievements

• added a lot of new metrics:
  • no_generated_files
  • has_tests_in_t_dir
  • no_stdin_for_prompting
  • no_large_files
  • metayml_declares_perl_version
  • has_version_in_each_file
  • fits_fedora_license
  • easily_repackageable
  • easily_repackageable_by_debian
  • easily_repackageable_by_fedora
• add support for aggegregated and experimental metrics
• start to integrate Testing Best Practices
• fixed lots of bugs in prereq_matches_use and build_prereq_matches_use
• mark core and dual-life distributions
• added a page with various stats to the website
• added a JSON view of 'Prerequisites' page
• various small and not so small improvements all over the place
• collected tons of further ideas and feedback :-)

2008-04-05: QA Hackathon

We hack on CPANTS, so things might break this weekend...

2008-03-31: Preparing for the QA Hackathon

This weekend, I'm participating in the QA Hackathon in Oslo. My journey there is sponsored by Vienna.pm - thanks!

To prepare for the hacking, I finally set up a mailinglist for svn commit messages: http://lists.useperl.at/listinfo/cpants-commit. If you're interested in what is happening in the wonderfull world of CPANTS, go ahead and subscribe!

Limitations

CPANTS is not about running the test suite that most distributions ship with. This is done by the CPAN testers.

One big limitation of CPANTS is that it cannot actually execute any code: The module might not run on the machine doing the testing, it might have third-party dependencies, etc. CPANTS can only gather data and Kwalitee by looking at files, source code etc. This means that there are a lot of bugs in the Kwalitee-calculating code. Don't take everything here too serious! In a future version it might be possible to collect metadata from various distributed testers who run the tests on different platforms and settings (as CPAN testers do).

More information

Various talks I held on CPANTS at various Conferences / Workshops:

• YAPC::Europe 2006, Birmingham
• YAPC::Europe 2005, Braga
• FOSDEM 2005, Brussels
• YAPC::Europe 2004, Belfast
• 2nd Hungarian Perl Workshop 2004, Budapest
• Vienna.pm Techmeet 2003, Vienna

Slides of the talk given by Michael G. Schwern at YAPC::Europe 2001 in Amsterdam.

Please report bugs etc via rt.perl.org