Two cents from someone who appreciates the hell out of the CPAN testing service and eagerly awaits new reports every time I release a new version of a module.

Sorry, but paying attention is the author's job. A fail is something that should be fixed, period, regardless of the number of them. As mentioned elsewhere, the idea of author's "receiving" FAIL reports is outdated anyway: they should be pulling them via a RSS feed.

+1

I don't like this: failure by any other name would smell just as bad. In other words, if an end user is not going to have a happy, functional module after typing install Foo::Bar at the CPAN prompt, this is a failure that should be noted as such and fixed by the author. Makefiles have a surprising amount of power and flexibility in this regard.

Yep. Use RSS or deal with the duplicates, I say.

Thanks for raising it. I honestly feel the problem is not with the testers or the testing service, but the authors. But perhaps I'm still grumpy from the slew of modules I've come across on CPAN lately that are popular yet obviously unmaintained, with bug reports, questions, and unapplied patches that linger in the RT queues for years. It would be nice if we had some sort of system that tracked and reported on that.