[aur-general] Perl Upgrade, make test failures and you: The Hurt That Finds You First

[John D Jones III]

All:
In my quest to begin getting my packages updated for the recent Perl 
5.20 release. I have run into a number of problems with tests failing on 
most of the pkgbuilds, even stable pkgbuilds like perl-moose or 
perl-moo. These test errors primarily smell like this:


Test Summary Report
-------------------
t/00_modules.t                              (Wstat: 512 Tests: 0
Failed: 0)
   Non-zero exit status: 2
   Parse errors: No plan found in TAP output

with many more of the same. To fix this, I ended up just going through 
and mass rebuilding all my AUR perl pkgbuilds installed on my machine as 
such:

for p in $(pacman -Qm | grep perl- | awk '{ print $1 }'); do yaourt -S 
$p --noconfirm; [[ $? > 0 ]] && echo $p >> /tmp/fail.1; done

when that finishes, I then run:

for p in $(cat /tmp/fail.1); do yaourt -S $p --noconfirm; [[ $? > 0 ]] 
&& echo $p >> /tmp/fail.2; done

Note the increment of the integer for the /tmp/fail extension. I ran 
this once more ( with the correct fail.2 file >> /tmp/fail.3 ) and I 
watched the builds, and noted the failures that were due to out of date 
URLs, or errors beyond my control ( IE: missing patch files, etc ).

Something between the first run mass reinstalling all m/^perl-.+$/ with 
pacman -Qm and the second run, iterating the /tmp/fail.1 file all the 
failures from tests cleared up. the third run, caught the rest where 
there was a bum dependency or the like. For me with roughly 100 
installed pkgbuilds on a local machine from AUR. It took just the three 
runs. You may or may not experience similar results; some may only need 
to run twice, some may need to run 4 or 5 times ( Just remember to 
increment your integer file extension between each run to 4 and/or 5 as 
applicable). But this should help in fixing the test failures that so 
many are seeing. Now if you don't use yaourt to manage your packages, 
I'm sorry. I've used it for 7 years without issue and point and laugh at 
all the haters. Haters gonna hate. :-P If someone out there cares to 
provide instructions for a either a yaourt alternative tool, such as 
packer, or a raw method, please reply to this post. Any flaming about 
yaourt ( or Perl ) will result in me LOLing at you with every ounce of 
LOL this mortal coil can muster.

Now, all that said. Please don't mark a pkgbuild out of date simply 
because the tests fail. Leave the author a comment instead. Only mark 
the Perl pkgbuilds out of date, that are in fact out of date... If you 
mark one of my pkgbuilds out of date and it's not, I will happily unmark 
it and give you the URL to this very post.

-- 
Thanks,
John D Jones III
UNIX Zealot; Perl Lover
unixgeek1972 at gmail.com
jnbek1972 at gmail.com
http://zoelife4u.org/