Perl Seminar New York, sponsor of monthly technical meetings in New York
City since 2000 (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/perlsemny/),
announces the initiation of "Phalanx Phoenix: Mentored Maintenance of
CPAN Modules."
The original Phalanx project, initiated by Andy Lester
(http://qa.perl.org/phalanx/), aimed at improving the code, testing and
documentation of important, non-core Perl modules on CPAN. A Perl
Seminar NY team met in several sessions between January and June 2005 to
"phalanx" (http://tinyurl.com/yku7jr) CPAN distributions Text-Template
and HTML-Template. We learned a tremendous amount about code
maintenance and quality assurance -- and had a good time in our
face-to-face collective hacking sessions. We reported on our efforts at
YAPC::NA::2005 in Toronto (http://hew.ca/yapc/phalanx/slides/index.html).
In the last year-and-a-half the Phalanx project has largely been
dormant. In part this was because the CPAN module authors on whose
distributions the various Phalanx teams worked were not obliged to
incorporate the teams' work into new versions of those CPAN distributions.
In that same time period, however, there has been more attention paid to
the need to guarantee continued maintenance of CPAN distributions when
their authors, due to changes in life circumstances, no longer can give
them the maintenance attention they need
(http://thenceforward.net/perl/yapc/YAPC-NA-2006/chicago.html). The
Perl community appears to lack a central place where CPAN authors who
need to transfer maintenance responsibilities for their distributions
can hook up with potential new maintainers.
Rising from the ashes like the storied Phoenix, the Perl Seminar NY's
Phalanx project will address this problem via mentored maintenance of
CPAN modules conducted in collective hacking sessions. We seek to match
up current CPAN authors/maintainers who need to transfer or share
maintenance responsibilities with new CPAN participants who either can
immediately assume maintenance or who can aim to do so when mentored by
other current CPAN authors.
We are currently assembling a list of CPAN distributions whose authors
are ready, willing and able to transfer or share maintenance
responsibilities. Once we have that list, each participating Perl
Seminar NY member will pick a module to work on and develop a plan of
work for that module. We will discuss the plans of work face-to-face in
collective hacking sessions conducted in a suitable location (e.g.,
http://www.drinkgoodstuff.com/ny/default.asp). When the collective
feels the plan is viable, we'll ask the current author/maintainer to
sign the participant on as co-maintainer or to transfer primary
maintenance responsibility outright. The collective will then hold each
participant to a high standard of quality in module maintenance. We
would like to begin our F2F sessions in January 2006.
We're conceiving of Phalanx Phoenix primarily as a collective hacking
experience, so we view the face-to-face sessions as very important --
and also as the most fun! But between sessions most of the work will be
conducted online, so we don't want to exclude Perl hackers and would-be
module maintainers who can't make our in-person sessions.
If you are a CPAN author who needs to share or transfer maintenance of a
CPAN distribution, please email me (jkeen AT verizon DOT net) with the
name of the distro. Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan
- Phalanx Phoenix: Mentored Maintenance of CPAN Modules James E Keenan
-