Sun, 14 May 2017
Perl Toolchain Summit 2017 - Day 4
I didn't get as much done on the final day of the Perl Toolchain Summit because I needed to get home for work on Monday. But I did manage to enlist others in helping me, which is even better.
Devel::Cover has always had a problem in that top level statements (those not in a sub) in modules cannot be covered. This is because perl throws away the optree as soon as it has executed. My knowledge of the internals has never been good enough to even work out a sensible plan for how to solve this, but fortunately Aaron Crane is a good deal cleverer than me and thinks he might be able to develop a solution. It may need perl to have extra hooks, or it might involve deep magic, or both, but at least the end of the tunnel is not pitch black any more. Thanks Aaron!
Then I was discussing how to improve cpancover with Olaf and mentioned that a queue for newly uploaded modules would help to reduce latency for the coverage reports. Joel Berger was sitting right there too, and he knows something about Minion, the job queue for Mojolicious. Joel kindly offered to put together a queue system to replace my naïve shell script. Thanks Joel!
I took part in the discussion about the future of the PTS (spolier - we like it, and have a few ideas on how to make it better still) and then it was time to head back home.
Thanks to Neil, BooK, and Laurent for organising such a great event. Thanks to Wendy to keeping us all healthily fed (or not so healthily, if desired). Thanks to everyone who attended and helped make the event such a success. And, as ever, thanks to the sponsors: Booking.com, ActiveState, cPanel, FastMail, MaxMind, Perl Careers, MongoDB, SureVoIP, Campus Explorer, Bytemark, CAPSiDE, Charlie Gonzalez, Elastic, OpusVL, Perl Services, Procura, Oetiker+Partner.
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Perl Toolchain Summit 2017 - Day 3
My third day at the Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS) was primarily spent in trying to make the cpancover server and infrastructure into more of a production-ready system and less of a Devel::Cover playground. The first step in this direction was supposed to be easy - I made a login for the metacpan group with the idea that they could regularly rsync the coverage results for backup purposes. Unfortunately, this lead me down a yak shaving path I wasn't planning on travelling until later.
When setting up cpancover, I decided to take the easy option and chuck all the results into a single directory. I made the filesystem ext4 so I wouldn't have to worry about hitting limits. Unfortunately, the metacpan box doing the rsync is set up on ext3 and won't support more that 32k subdirectories. So I need to fix up the way that results are stored. I knew this would come sooner or later, even if only because I would surely one day get sufficiently tired of typing ls and immediately regretting it.
In order to make such a change, I need a proper development area to test it. Cpancover has basically just been running since I set it going about three years ago, when I pretty much built it in place. So before making such a large change I need to be able to control things like the docker image being used and the directories being written to. This is also important to be able to allow anyone else to work on the system. So much of the day was spent on this.
Two people separately came to me with the problem that some of their tests
require extra modules to be installed and so, by default, these tests aren't
run and the coverage suffers accordingly. Four years ago, at the QA Hackathon
in Lancaster, a number of clever people got together, and I was there too. We
thrashed out The Lancaster
Consensus
which, thankfully, included a solution to this problem. The environment
variable $EXTENDED_TESTING can be set to indicate that the user or process
running tests is willing to run optional tests that may take extra time or
resources to complete. So I make cpancover set that environment variable, and
Graham and Tux altered Moo and Spreadsheet::Read respectively to pay attention
to it. I mention this in detail for such a simple change (for me) just to
point out (again) the value of the summit, not just for the work which takes
place at the time, but also for how it smooths subsequent work, even years
later.
I did a few other bits and bobs, and ended up watching an Italian dancing gorilla and a horse on a ladder from Azerbaijan whilst waiting for some modules to install, which can't be bad. (Thanks Eurovision.)
Thanks again to all the sponsors who made this possible: Booking.com, ActiveState, cPanel, FastMail, MaxMind, Perl Careers, MongoDB, SureVoIP, Campus Explorer, Bytemark, CAPSiDE, Charlie Gonzalez, Elastic, OpusVL, Perl Services, Procura, Oetiker+Partner.
