lcpan tips 022: Testing all dependents

About this series: A collection of short blog posts about lcpan tips/recipes. Some posts will also end up in the upcoming App::lcpan::Manual::Cookbook POD to be included in the App::lcpan distribution. First article is here. See the whole series.

About lcpan: an application to download and index a mini CPAN mirror on your local filesystem, so in effect you will have something like your own CPAN with a command-line tool (or perl API) to query and extract information from your mirror.

When you release a new version of a module, CPAN Testers will test your module on a variety of platforms. Sometimes, when they happen to test other modules that depend on your module, they will also uncover problems that is caused by your new version breaking your dependents. However, this is not done systematically or completely. If you want to make sure your changes do not break your dependents, you can test for yourself.

Suppose I’m making some changes to Regexp::Pattern. Let’s see who depends on this module:

% lcpan rdeps Regexp::Pattern -R --phase runtime --rel requires
+----------------------------------+-----------+--------------+-------------+
| dist                             | author    | dist_version | req_version |
+----------------------------------+-----------+--------------+-------------+
| App-Licensecheck                 | JONASS    | v3.0.36      | 0           |
| App-RegexpPatternUtils           | PERLANCAR | 0.003        | 0           |
| Bencher-Scenarios-RegexpPattern  | PERLANCAR | 0.003        | 0           |
| Regexp-Common-RegexpPattern      | PERLANCAR | 0.001        | 0           |
|   Bencher-Scenarios-RegexpCommon | PERLANCAR | 0.02         | 0           |
| Test-Regexp-Pattern              | PERLANCAR | 0.004        | v0.2.7      |
+----------------------------------+-----------+--------------+-------------+

Force reinstalling all dependents

One way to run tests for all dependents is by force-(re)installing all those distributions. One way to do that:

% for mod in `lcpan rdeps Regexp::Pattern -R | td select dist | perl -pe's/^\s+//' | dist2mod`; do
    echo "Installing $mod ..."
    lcpanm --force $mod
  done

dist2mod is provided by App::DistUtils.

Extracting tarballs

Another way to test all dependents is to extract them to a temporary directory then run prove on each. lcpan provides the handy subcommand extract-dist to do this. But you might want to install the dependents all first to pull their dependencies.

% mkdir test-deps
% cd test-deps
% for dist in `lcpan rdeps Regexp::Pattern -R | td select dist`; do
    mkdir $dist && cd $dist && lcpan extract-dist $dist && cd ..
done

We can now test each dependent distro one by one, or all in one go:

% for dist in *; do
    echo "Testing $dist ..."
    cd $dist/*; prove -lr; cd ../..
done

Advertisement