<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/sqlite/cpants_all.db.gz'>cpants_all.db.gz</a>
</blockquote>
</ul>

<h3>News</h3>

<dl>
<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>
