Hi! I missed most of this discussion due to work and a very important shopping trip to IKEA (well, maybe not that important, but I'll let you argue this out with my girlfriend...)
I'm also a bit exhausted now, so here are just some semi-random comments on this thread: - I think the biggest problem with CPANTS now is lack of (meaningful) tests. There were a lot of suggestions for more tests on this list, in private mail (and some even in my brain..). The only problem is that I never had time implementing them ($job etc, you know). Then, in Jannuary this year, I changed jobs, so I had to move CPANTS to a new server. At the same time I did some fundamental changes to the internals (e.g. factor out Module:CPANTS::Analyse to allow for stuff like Test::Kwalitee and cpants_lint.pl) But... I'm now settled in my new job (and new appartment), the new and improved CPANTS is running on a new server (provided by yi.org, thanks again to Tyler MacDonald!). So basically all the time I can spend on CPANTS will go into new tests (eg a check if used modules (minus stuff in Module::CoreList) matches PREREQ_PM). - Until I grok PPI and merry it with CPANTS, testing distribution kwalitee is basically the only halfway serious option. Even this doesn't work all the time (see has_test_pod*). Dist tests are low-hanging fruits. But I'll promise I'll reach further. Later... - CPANTS as a multiplayer online game is an easy way to get peoples attention without totaly offending them. I /could/ send an email to everybody on CPAN with some 'helpfull hints' on how to improve kwalitee. I guess the biggest effect would be to get added to some SPAM blacklists etc... But with the tongue-in-cheek 'highscore lists', people get interested/hooked and DO improve their code. I got several mails of people who discovered semi-serious problems in their code (eg missing 'use strict' statements) because they checked their CPANTS ratings. If people want to 'cheat', that's ok for me. As soon as I have some time to spend on the issue, I can improve the tests (but that's rather low on my todo list, as I like to assume that we are all grown-ups and do not need faked cpants ratings to boost our ego (I might be wrong...)). And no, I won't take the fun out of CPANTS. - With regard to various problems with certain metrics: I won't remove a single metric unless I (or somebody else...) implemented a new one (and even than I'll think very hard before removing it) Again, serveral people found bugs/lacks of docu thanks to has_test_pod_coverage. Yes, some people use other tools to check pod/code coverage. Ok, some people don't ship their developer test suite to the world. But those are very few and very able authors. They do not need CPANTS to increase their kwalitee. But there are hundreds of authors who do need hints to increase kwalitee (most likely because there's a new trend in Perl, and not everyone attends YAPCs / reads all the lists / etc). CPANTS is a way to introduce those new (or not so new) trends to the majority of CPAN authors who do not participate in the 'inner circles' of PERL. -- #!/usr/bin/perl http://domm.zsi.at for(ref bless{},just'another'perl'hacker){s-:+-$"-g&&print$_.$/}
