Bug#742004: perltidy.LOG file left behind

[Russ Allbery]

Control: reassign -1 libperl-critic-perl

Russ Allbery <rra at debian.org> writes:

> This may acutally be a bug in Perl::Critic or perltidy, but since this
> is the interface I'm calling, reporting it here.

> With this upgrade:

> [UPGRADE] perltidy:i386 20120701-1 -> 20130922-1

> Test::Perl::Critic now leaves perltidy.LOG files behind in the current
> directory after the test has completed.  Since the results are all
> reported via normal test results, this seems pointless, and it leaves
> build clutter behind.

I looked into this further.  The problem is that Perl::Tidy now always
attempts to create a log file in the current directory unless told to
create it elsewhere with the logfile parameter to its constructor.  (There
doesn't seem to be a way to tell it not to create the thing, although
maybe you can point it to /dev/null.)  Perl::Critic's policy for running
Perl::Tidy doesn't pass that parameter or provide any way for the caller
to pass it.

That makes this more Perl::Critic's problem than Test::Perl::Critic.
Reassigning accordingly, although arguably this is a perltidy bug and
perltidy should stop writing files into the current directory unless
someone actually asks for them.

(I'm a bit grumpy because I spent two hours debugging this.)

Note that this new behavior also breaks builds where the source directory
is readonly, a technique used by, for instance, Automake's distcheck
target to ensure that source files are not modified incorrectly by the
build.  This therefore broke the builds of some of my packages that use
Test::Perl::Critic to test the style of Perl scripts embedded in
Automake-managed projects, since those tests are run from the read-only
source directory, not the build directory, so that the test infrastructure
can find the source Perl scripts to check.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>