Testing Perl Modules on Windows: A Cry For Help

I've been working on modules again, after a recent push, and I found a big project whose .travis.yml file only went to Perl 5.20. I thought I'd get some dev brownie points by adding the next two stable versions, and found that my build was dying in the Pull Request submission process.

Specifically, it was dying on the checks. It passes Travis-CI, which runs the tests on Unix-like systems, but it was failing with Appveyor.

"What is Appveyor?", I asked myself.

Perhaps this isn't a direct quote.

Appveyor is a continuous integration service that tests against Windows systems. Scott Hanselman wrote a glowing review of it three years ago.

But there's no .appveyor.yml file in the project, so it runs and fails.

I've mentioned this on the project IRC, and no, I'm not going to name names, because there is movement toward testing on Windows, and even if it doesn't work, I admire the goal.

I wrote this three years ago, in response to a Python conference video:

2) Sure, real programmers use Unix/Linux to run their code, real programmers, but beginner programmers don't come in knowing how to set up an environment and come in with the (Windows) computer they have, and the documentation sucks and they feel lost and they don't like it and they don't feel the power, and they're gone. Even if you dislike Microsoft, good tools for Windows and good documentation are important for new programmers, important for building community, important for inclusiveness.

I run Windows, but I program on and for Linux, and only have one project based on Windows. But I have installed ActiveState and Strawberry Perls, and think that if you write general-purpose modules, you should be sure to test against Windows as well as Linux.

But, Travis-CI has documentation covering Perl projects. Appveyor says you can use Perl 5.20. eserte wrote a post on Appveyor for blogs.perl.org last year, but I'd love to see better documentation from either them, the Perl community or both. Following is the YAML from eserte, with a switch to "check only master branch", but as with Travis, which uses perlbrew and allows testing as far back as 5.8.8, I think having it test against older versions of Perl, both ActivePerl and Strawberry, would be the thing.

branches:
  only:
    - master

skip_tags: true

cache:
  - C:\strawberry



install:

  - if not exist "C:\strawberry" cinst strawberryperl

  - set PATH=C:\strawberry\perl\bin;C:\strawberry\perl\site\bin;C:\strawberry\c\bin;%PATH%

  - cd C:\projects\%APPVEYOR_PROJECT_NAME%

  - cpanm --installdeps .



build_script:

  - perl Makefile.PL

  - dmake test

If you have a more fully-featured .appveyor.yml file you'd like the Perl community to use, especially distinguishing MakeMaker modules from Dist::Zilla modules, I'd love to see it.