I am close to giving up trying to support my Perl modules on Windows. Personally, I have nothing against it, despite all the odd quirky "not-quite-UNIX"es about it. I'm sure the same could be said in reverse, of all the "not-quite-Windows"es about the UNIXes, coming from a Windows developer.
However, I am continually annoyed at the almost complete lack of any smoke-test results ever coming from Cygwin or MSWin32 machines. I can upload a new module to CPAN and within literally hours have a dozen or so smoke-test reports from Linux and FreeBSD machines. Within a few days, a flood more results from these, and also Darwin, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris. But quite often I can sit and wait weeks, if not months before I see the first result from Cygwin or MSWin32.
It's not that I'll ever actually stop looking after code - if someone were to point out a problem or send me a patch, I'm sure I could include it. It's just very hard for me as a developer without a Windows box to know if any of my code actually works on Windows, or if not, to be able to fix it. While I don't have any BSD, Solaris, or OS X boxes, I do at least have the confidence of the smoke-test reports to claim my code works there.
I must therefore conclude one of two things:
- Nobody is using Perl, or at least my Perl modules, on Windows; or
- Nobody using Perl on Windows cares about testing and code quality
I would really dislike having to declare this, because I feel sure there ought to be Windows users around who care. So perhaps someone somewhere can look into actually installing the test reporter module. It isn't hard, really...
