For the past couple of days. I have been working on setting up a second frontend web node for iusethis.com, as well as rebuilding my development environment after upgrading my laptop to snow leopard (XS modules seems to be broken on that environment for now, so I'm developing in a vmware ubuntu image instead).
Most of this time has been spent watching my various systems running test after test of CPAN modules, which has made me realize two things. 1. CPAN has a huge number of tests, some of them very time consuming and 2. End users don't really need to run all these tests.
All they care about is getting the module installed and in working order, which means most of the time, all they need is for their module to run 00use.t to check that the modules can be loaded. I understand the need of CPAN authors to get their tests run on different platforms and perl versions, however, Perl has a very comprehensive smoker setup that handles this. There is no need to force this upon the end user as well.
Luckily, there is a solution. I was discussing this problem on IRC with Bingos, one of the biggest smokers out there, and he found this:
12:42 < @BinGOs> rjbs++ 12:42 < @BinGOs> Module::Install::ExtraTests appears to do that already 12:42 < @BinGOs> http://search.cpan.org/~rjbs/Module-Install-ExtraTests-0.006/lib/Module/Install/ExtraTests.pm