On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 18:09 -0600, Eric Wilhelm wrote: > Would anti-pollution laws help or hurt CPAN?
In this community I get the sense that even mentioning laws can be bad. But I don't see how some strong encouragement would hurt. ;) Personally I think any author should continue to be able to upload just about whatever they want to their own directory (or is there some restriction I never noticed?). Community pressure seems to be doing well enough to keep most of us from stepping on toes. But I have been wondering about somehow integrating the 'official' modules list into the search process. Can the search bias results, (maybe with an option to turn off) by sorting listed modules above stuff found in various authors directories? Or even perhaps not include unlisted modules by default? Could it indicate in the search results whether or not a module is listed? My assumption here is the module concept and namespace discussions still get at least a minimal review before a module gets listed. Then some rules or guidelines could be applied to the response/maintenance/patching of "listed" modules, leaving the unlisted space more freeform. Just a thought; please be gentle if, in my relative ignorance I've just accidentally trolled. > How do you get more authors to do their homework before reinventing the > wheel? By not listing their contributions. Given something like the above, their contributions would still be available if they insisted on reinventing the wheel, but would not pollute the _default_ search results. > How do you determine if an old module is perfect, unused, or > unmaintained? > > If it's in-use but unmaintained, how do you find the other users that > are (apparently) dealing with the same issues as you? Is there still a national mongers list? And of course there's #perl, Use Perl and Perl Monks. Unless the module has a mailing list I'd think that covers as much ground as reasonable. > And most importantly to Ovid, what is the best way to "just get to work" > if you haven't been able to contact an existing author? ... Could CPAN show a 'branch' (I suppose this would actually be a search feature)? After switching maintenance to a new person, continue to show the last pre-branch version, at least for some span of time. Until all this gets sorted out, I'd say give due notice in a few places, including a time frame for when you plan to start work, and then request to become the official maintainer if you get no response. If you have emailed them directly (presumably a couple times before you approached the list), and then email them a notice posted in a few places I think you have done everything reasonable. > Some of these are questions apply to open-source in general and some are > more specific to CPAN (due to the blessing/curse namespace issues.) > > Maybe a module-hackers-announce list? Post to that and CC the original > author and then start hacking until someone says stop? That sure beats > waiting an indefinite amount of time for approval, but then my approach > to traffic engineering involves big green "go" signs. I would think this list serves the announcement purpose well enough. "Subject: Module::Name maintenance authority change pending" (or some such). CC'd to the author(s)/list for the modules of course. Speaking of mailing lists, is there a community listserv authors could use? I have mailing lists for a couple projects (currently getting dusty), but not everyone might have the option to set up their own mailing lists. And setting up a sourceforge project may be way over the top for many small modules. If there is not currently a freely available source, this is something I might be able to contribute to the community, at least for a large number of relatively low-traffic lists. TTFN, Sean
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