For those of you not at YAPC, this BOF started out as Schwern wanting
to hack CPANTS. During YAPC, Skud had an idea for perlmodstyle, and
the BOF was scheduled on Saturday to talk about CPANTS, Skud's doc[o],
and general CPANy bits.
40 people showed up, some who have been using Perl for 3 months. This
was not intended to be a working group, but a general discussion about
CPAN. What you've read in the minutes is little more than people expressing
their personal opinions.
Aside from a bunch of people stating their opinions, this module was
moderatly useful: a few people shared some good ideas, and a bunch of
CPAN users stated where they're comfortable and uncomfortable with CPAN;
if we want to clean up CPAN, here are some issues to address (either with
upgrades to PAUSE/CPAN, or more/better/more visible docs).
Among the true fruits of this meeting are:
skud got some feedback on perlmodstyle
Ingy and Damian agreed to work on ReportBug.pm
Schwern talked about CPANTS again
Damian shot down the idea of converting CPAN into Sourceforge,
overloading Ask and onion, and creating more vehicles
to whine, whimper and moan to module authors
You can consider everything else to be user feedback which may or may
not be meaningful.
On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 07:58:31AM -0700, Ask Bjoern Hansen wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, Adam Turoff wrote:
> > Group Authorship
> [...]
> > reefknot is developed on sourceforge, release on CPAN; 3 possible IDs
> > but no one knew which ID would publish reefknot
>
> So?
>
> In any case, Andreas (and/or Jarkko) explained it well (summary:
> it works as designed) elsewhere to Skud (I think it was).
I think shane raised the issue, and skud talked to the issue somewhat.
shane sounded like she was finding issues with the design (I think).
It sounds like the policy needs to be clarified, possibly more publically.
No more no less. This is just a whine, and some other projects may be
whining about policy for the same reason. It doesn't sound like there's
a real problem to solve here.
> > CPANTS
> [...]
> > making the barriers to entry high is one way to ensure good code on
> > CPAN, but it's a crappy way to go about it
>
> Jon Orwant thinks the barriers to entry being too high. We talked
> about this at the CPAN meeting at TPC4. I don't remember the
> consensus.
We spoke on both sides of the issue. Both sides have merit. This group
didn't come to a conclusion.
> > Group CVS
> > Action item: Ask Ask to open up CVS on onion for public r/w
> >
> > Action Item: Ask Ask to set up group perms and assignment of group
> > perms for CVS projects
>
> I'd rather have us just use SourceForge if the code is going to be
> public anyway.
The action item was to 'Ask Ask', not 'Overload Ask'. :-) 'No' and
'use Sourceforge' are perfectly acceptable answers.
> > Versioning:
> > Big sky issue
>
> We talked about this extensively at the CPAN meeting at the last
> TPC. Sarathy, Larry, Tim Bunce, Jarkko, Graham and many others were
> there and had all kinds of good ideas.
Someone raised the issue (I forget who). When it was time to discuss
it, we shot it down for further discussion because it was a thorny
issue that greater minds were thinking about.
> > PPM:
> [...]
> > No one has built alternative repositories of modules
>
> I don't use Windows, but last I checked there was a few alternative
> PPM repositories. (Or maybe I'm misunderstanding something).
CPAN isn't mirrored in full as PPM distributions. ActiveState used
to maintain 150+/- out of a possible 1600 distributions. Now, it's
about 1200/2100. That, and it's not clear where the alternative
PPM repositories are.
Choose who you want to blame on this one. More whining and moaning,
nothing more.
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> > [general dissatisfaction]
> >
> > upload process for new module authors kinda sucks
>
> What sucks about it?
Read that as [whine moan whimper grunt].
> > slow response
>
> Read the FAQ. http://www.cpan.org/modules/04pause.html#namespace
> "You need not wait for a response. Generally a lack of response can
> be taken as acceptance of the module name being proposed."
Read that as people not reading the FAQ. MPEG at 2300. :-)
Z.
