<p>CPANTS is an acronym for <b>CPAN</b> <b>T</b>esting <b>S</b>ervice. The goals of the CPANTS project are to provide some sort of quality measure (called <b>"<a href="/kwalitee.html">Kwalitee</a>"</b>) and lots of metadata for all distributions on CPAN.</p>

<p>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 <a href="http://lists.cpan.org/showlist.cgi?name=perl-qa">perl-qa</a> list).</p>

<h3>Why don't you...</h3>

<ul>
<li>Search for <a href="/author/search">authors</a> or <a href="/dist/search">distributions</a>.
<li>Take a look at the various <a href="graphs.html">reports</a> generated at this site.
<li>Admire the top gamers of the <a href="highscores">CPANTS game</a>. 
<li>Download the latest CPANTS data as a SQLite DB from here
<blockquote><a href='/static/cpants_all.db.bz2'>cpants_all.db.bz2</a>
</blockquote>
</ul>

<h3>News</h3>

<dl>
<dt>2007-10-30: reworked dist view</dt>
<dd>
The view for a dist is now broken up into several subpages. This makes the data more easy to read. I've also fixed some minor problems in the list of prereqs etc (links are now going to the dist each module is in).
</dd>

<dt>2007-10-29: new optional metric: <i>use_warnings</i></dt>
<dd>
I've added a new metric: <code>use_warnings</code>. This metric checks if all of your modules include a line like 'use warnings;'. As this does not work for old Perls, I've made it an optional metric (for now..). 
<br><br>
A patch submitted by Adriano Ferreira enhances MANIFEST-checking (and removes a bug caused by chdir). See RT #28982 for details.
<br><br>
Andy Armstrong suggested to also look in <code>xt/</code> for tests, because this is becoming the new place for optional author tests (like pod-coverage). Which I implemented...
<br><br>
I've also re-analysed all of CPAN. The only thing left to do now (besides adding more metrics) is to make the various graphs work again...
</dd>

<dt>2007-10-24: CPANTS <u>really</u> up again</dt>
<dd>
Long time since the last update, I blame YAPC::Europe & real live.<br>
<br>
Anyway, CPANTS is now running again, but still with a few hickups. I had to
move the actual analysis from this machine to a private machine at home,
because the analysis uses a lot of CPU - too much for the box provided by <a
href="http://hexten.net">hexten.net</a>.
<br><br>
I also fixed some bugs in the handling of Meta.YML, but there are still a few
problems left. So please take the CPANTS game even less serious than ever :-)
<br><br>
But now that the basic setup is working again, I'll fix those problems soon.
<br><br>
</dd>

</dl>

<a href="/news.html">Not news anymore...</a>

<h3>Limitations</h3>

<p>CPANTS is not about running the test suite that most distributions ship with. This is done by the <a href="http://testers.cpan.org/">CPAN testers</a>.</p>

<p>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).</p>


<h3>More information</h3>

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

<ul>
<li><a href="http://domm.plix.at/talks/2006_birmingham_cpants">YAPC::Europe 2006, Birmingham</a>
<li><a href="http://domm.zsi.at/talks/2005_braga_cpants">YAPC::Europe 2005, Braga</a>
<li><a href="http://domm.zsi.at/talks/2005_brussels_cpants">FOSDEM 2005, Brussels</a>
<li><a href="http://domm.zsi.at/talks/2004_belfast_cpants">YAPC::Europe 2004, Belfast</a>
<li><a href="http://domm.zsi.at/talks/2004_budapest_cpants">2nd Hungarian Perl Workshop 2004, Budapest</a>
<li><a href="http://domm.zsi.at/talks/2003_vienna_cpants">Vienna.pm Techmeet 2003, Vienna</a>
</ul>

<p><a href="http://schwern.org/~schwern/talks/CPANTS/">Slides</a> of the talk given by Michael G. Schwern at YAPC::Europe 2001 in Amsterdam.</p>

<p>Please report bugs etc via <a href="https://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?Dist=Module-CPANTS-Analyse">rt.perl.org</a></p>
