----- Original Message ---- > From: Shlomi Fish <shlo...@iglu.org.il>
> On Saturday 07 August 2010 00:44:05 Ovid wrote: > > Laughing at that "active_dev" tag. > > > What's wrong with it? First, my apologies for being so flippant. That was rude of me and I'm sorry. I just typed what popped into my head without thinking about how it sounded. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that these tags become popular. Over time, the majority of CPAN modules are not actively developed because the authors move on to other languages, other careers, or just forget about the darned module. They're going to leave the "active_dev" tag there because they forgot about it, not because it's true. I can't tell you how many times I've supplied a complete patch, with tests and documentation, for a known bug in a module and had absolutely no response from the author. If I am willing to do all of that work for them and they ignore it, why on earth would they bother with a new release just to fix a tag which doesn't alter the module's functionality? They won't. They're not going to care. Thus, I confidently predict that the CPAN would become littered with tons of "active_dev" tags which are flat out lies and thus undermine our confidence in tags in the first place. On a related note, I've not made a new release of Sub::Override in 5 years because it's complete and apparently correct. Is it actively developed or not? > > I can't say I've really been paying attention here, but while some tags > > (requires C compiler) seem like they might be reasonable, other tags such > > as "black_magic" seem highly subjective. And the "source_filter" tag seems > > to belong in the "black_magic" category. > > Well, tags may be overlapping. But not all "black_magic" modules are source > filters (e.g: Error.pm which is not a source filter, but is black magic.). That misses the point. Who defines black_magic? What I see as normal code (e.g., reaching into a typeglob) is seen as black magic to others. I'm not saying this module is a bad idea, but ambiguous/subjective tags don't seem useful to me. "adopt_me" doesn't seem problematic. However, maybe I'll use this module and create a "works_on_my_machine" tag :) Cheers, Ovid -- Buy the book - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlhks/ Tech blog - http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/ Twitter - http://twitter.com/OvidPerl Official Perl 6 Wiki - http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6
