META.yml feature for autotesters?

[email protected] (Tyler MacDonald)
Newsgroups perl.qa,perl.cpan.discuss
Message-ID <[email protected]>
	I've been thinking about automated testing again. I know this is a
bad habit and I should stop it and just get on with my work, but here's
where I'm at:

	Sometimes it's beneficial for an automated tester to install
additional packages (in software I'm releasing, Test::CPANpm and sqlite are
perfect examples). It would be good to have a standard way to tell a smoke
tester what these packages are.

	How does everybody feel about making this a defined "feature" in
the META.yml spec? Something like:

optional_features:
  - automated_testing:
      description: Automated testing of all of this package's features
      requires:
        DBD::SQLite2: 0

	If an optional_feature field for packages useful for automated
testing was standardized, functionality could be added to CPAN::YACSmoke and
PITA to take advantage of it, and then there would be an easy way for an
author to define prerequisites for doing an exhaustive smoke test of their
distribution.

	What do y'all think?

	Thanks,
		Tyler
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