[Isamu]

A good time to acknowledge that CPAN was a very influential example for internet libraries that came afterward.

I got a lot out of it for years, time to say thanks! You guys in the Perl community were awesome and still are!

A shout out to CTAN too!

[Mithaldu]

To be honest, it still is. Many of the other ones have yet to catch up with CPAN in terms of richness in eco system and breadth of offered features.

For example, i know no (and i may be ignorant) language that has a distributed library testing community.

[kinow]

Trying to build one for Java in my spare time - http://cjan.org

[igravious]

I was unaware of the distributed library testing community. How does it work, pray tell?

[daxelrod]

Volunteers with lots of different perl versions and OSes run software that monitors CPAN for new uploads, and then automatically downloads them and runs their automated tests, and uploads the results.

Here's more on CPANTesters: http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/WhatIsCPANTesters

And here's an example of the results for a popular module: http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Moose+2.1600

[Mithaldu]

Quite short version:

Almost every perl module has a set of test scripts that can usually be called up by running make test. This happens by default when installing something with CPAN.pm. The output of this can be captured by CPAN.pm and sent on to a receiving server. Said server can be anything, but in almost all cases is the cpantesters metabase server, which integrates the result into a database which contains and summarizes the results of tests for libraries, by library version, operating system and perl version. In addition to people configuring their CPAN.pm that way and sending reports for everything installed, there are also many people who have set up servers that work on testing the newest version of every library uploaded to CPAN.

[jebus989]

Also CRAN, which is still meant to be pronounced C-RAN as an homage.