Hacking Thy Fearful Symmetry

Generating RT bugs out of CPAN Testers' Reports

October 30th, 2010
PerlCPAN Testersrt.cpan.org

A few hours ago, I received a CPAN Testers's report. The report was a genuine bug (CPANtesters++. Love you guys), and as I made my way to rt.cpan.org to create a ticket to track the issue, I found myself thinking that it'd be nice to have a 'bug this' button straight from the smoke report page.

You all know where that kind of thinking leads to, right?

I didn't GreaseMonkey'ed a button into the CPAN Testers page (yet), but I did the second-best thing. Namely, a little command-line script that takes a report url and uses it to auto-generates a bug report to the right distribution:

$ ./cpantest2rt.pl http://www.cpantesters.org/cpan/report/8648ea2e-e35d-11df-a329-07bc4e7aadc9

The script is pretty straight-forward. It grabs the bug report off the CPAN Testers site, figures out which distribution we're talking about, generates an email with the report information, gives you a chance to edit the report (the first line is the bug's title, the rest will be its description) and sends the email on its merry way to rt.cpan.org.

In a future iteration, I'll probably switch to using the REST interface to RT, but for now the email interface is proving to be Good Enoughtm.

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