Should I use the Core module Net::Ping even if it has so much failures on CPAN Testers?

cpan, perl

Solution

The `Net::Ping` on CPAN and in perl is basically the same. The only reason why perl's own test suite most of the times passes even if Net-Ping is included is the presence of these lines in the Net-Ping tests:

if ($ENV{PERL_CORE}) {
  unless ($ENV{PERL_TEST_Net_Ping}) {
    print "1..0 # Skip: network dependent test\n";
      exit;
  }

So network tests are skipped when building and testing perl itself (in this case the `PERL_CORE` environment variable is set).

And why are so many tests failing? Sometimes a look at the corresponding analysis.cpantesters.org page helps: http://analysis.cpantesters.org/solved?distv=Net-Ping-2.41 . You see a series of "Can ping/reach www...." tests failing here. So apparently tests just failed because some external servers were not reachable — simply they were down, or the smoke box had network problems.

I think it's quite safe to use `Net::Ping`.

Problem

The module `Net::Ping` seems to be a Core module. However CPAN Testers lists hundreds of test failures for the recent version 2.41 (and also for older ones). This is surprising to me and makes me thinking if this module can be recommended for usage. Is anybody knowing a reason for this and if it is a real problem? (At least to me this is strange since CPAN Testers is also a way to judge for a module or against. Having a Core module with so much failures kind of downgrades the name "Core module" to me...)

Original source