Perl Seminar NY meets as usual on the 3rd Tuesday of the month.

Tuesday, March 20, 6:15-8:15 pm (EDT)
NYPC User Group
481 8th Ave (Ramada New Yorker Hotel)
Suite 550
between West 34 and 35 Streets
Manhattan

Opening talk: To be announced. (While we're working on one
suggestion for a 20-30 minute talk, we haven't confirmed that yet, so
we're open to suggestion.)

Main talk: Jim Keenan, "Component-Focused Testing: The Case of the
Parrot Build Tools"

Abstract: Installation of an open-source software package such as
Perl or a CPAN module generally follows a 4-step process: configure,
build, test, install. Although 'make test' is usually thought of as
the place where all the testing happens, the successful completion of
each of the other stages implicitly constitutes the passing of a
functional test. But does there exist a place for a type of test
which is not included in the 'test' target but instead is run either
before the 'configure' stage or between the 'configure' and 'build'
stages?

In this talk, I argue that there is a role for such tests and I
describe how I have implemented a number of test suites, run post-
configure but pre-build, for those of Parrot's build tools written in
Perl 5. Such tests encourage provide more rapid feedback on the
results of refactoring than 'make test' can. Indeed, they encourage
Phalanx-style refactoring which makes the build tools more
maintainable over the long run.

*** Upcoming Meetings ***

For our April 17 and May 15 sessions, we are developing presentations
on Moose and on bioinformatics. But we welcome additional proposals,
both shorter (20-30) and longer (40-50) length.