"Sam Vilain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> - encourage curators to step forward, or groups of curators, for > each category; possibly even create mailing lists for people with > a general interest in the technology in that category; to field > questions about naming for new modules to fit into each category. > These curators must have the power to update the contents of the > relevant portions of the www.cpan.org site. Hi all, Everything that was said in this thread was very interresting and I, too, belive things should get better and I encourage those that want to do things _now_. I see few problems with CPAN, you might find them directly related to the need for curators: - Any one can start whatever hierarchy - Anyone can load whatever piece of code to CPAN, good or bad - Documentation level is a catastrophy, check how many readme are those generated by h2xs - The document about how to use CPAN is not clear enough or I haven't found the right one yet - 25 versions of the same module do no make it easy to look around in CPAN - Authors don't answer or have given up on maintaining there modules - The same day, the same module can be uploaded to CPAN multiple times I mirror CPAN at home and I check for new modules everyday. Guess how many times I think "what the Hell is this for???" Far from me the idea to refuse uploading of modules to CPAN but 3 years from now, we'll have a "useless module heap". If there is a need for curators, I believe it does, then those should be given a mandat and power to apply it or it will be useless. They must be able to say to a module author: "Sorry but this is not the quality level we expect, write some documentation and come back later for your upload". This is exactly what is done for moderated mailling lists. The net result would be (IMO): - No half baked idea, modules on CPAN (could be a good idea to go through what we have today in CPAN and throw away things) - Better quality in the documentation and test (hmm, I'd have to work on my own modules too) - More people involved in this mailling list (which has less than 20 active users) since it would be the way in to CPAN Around 15 new, or updates, modules are uploaded to CPAN everyday. This might sound drastic but it is not as bad as it sounds, I would have appreciated if someone said 'No' to something I write and that is not good enough for the community. This is not for discouraging module authors but, on the contrary, make them feel that their work is appreciated and that they must commit themselves to generate something "good" enough. Moderators rights should be: - Create new hierarchy roots - Refuse a module name - Refuse a module because its quality is too "low" - Refuse a module because of lack of documentation or tests or examples (or VERSION!!!) - Give maintenance rights - Try to merge modules by asking module authors to co-operate - Write public review or accept public reviews - Coordinate with module testers - etc ... I am whilling to have my modules filtered, I hope other do too. I'll also help if I can. Cheers, Nadim. PS: PPM modules vs plain module problems should be fixed too.
