Installable tests

[Ovid]

This is very speculative, but it would be nice to have an "opt-in" feature to allow tests to be installed. For a module like Foo::Bar::Baz, we could install tests under foo-bar-baz (lc and then s/::/-/g), though it's less clear what path they would be installed under.

With that, when I install a new version of a module, having a feature that would allow me to run installed tests for regressions would be lovely.

Of course, that means cpanminus would have to track what it installed (maybe it does and I don't know about that?) and which modules have "installable" tests. In the meta spec, having an extra key like x-install-tests would trigger the behavior (it would need to be "opt-in" instead of "opt-out" because not all tests can be easily installed and run).

However, while installing tests seems desirable, running installed tests seems outside the scope of cpanminus.

[miyagawa]

My first instinct is that this doesn't belong to cpanminus, or any other installer. Installer software only sets some environment variables and command line options and runs perl Makefile.PL; make; make install or perl Build.PL; perl ./Build; perl ./Build install. It has no knowledge about which subdirectories to copy files to, and which files actually need to be installed. It's all controlled by ExtUtils::Install and other build tools.

I suggest you to take a look at Module::Build::Tiny if you want to implement the behavior using the Build spec.

cpanminus would have to track what it installed (maybe it does and I don't know about that?)

perllocal.pod has the list of installed modules (not just cpanminus), and for each install, there's install.json under arch specific subdirectories.

[Ovid]

Thank you for that very helpful reply, @miyagawa !