Hello everyone. I've been hacking away various unrelated modules (RTSP::Lite, Net::SMTP::TLS, for example) and occasionally I send the original author an email or a bug report to fix whatever problem I found. However, a lot of these problems (and even more that other people patch/comment/report) are not handled since the original author is either too busy (could be too busy to patch or too busy to even reply to the email), is unreachable (email not relevant anymore, person unavailable) or various other reasons i'm sure others could jot down.
So, I thought maybe it's 'bout time to regular the authorship of modules. I've had a few basic concepts of it but I turn to the community to hear what other people have to say. What do you guys and gals think? Should we regulate? It will definitely help fix bugs and advance some of those discontinued modules. It will help relieve some clutter from who still get emails from people regarding issues on their module that they just delete or do not repond to. Some points I thought of (which might be wrong - I wanna hear what others think): - Have a process in which someone wants to take over a module, and the author is asked. If he does not reply within... oh, I don't know, 6 months? 1 year? the module authorship goes over to that person as a Co-Maintainer - allowing the original author to continue working on it if he pleases (and perhaps remove the new co-maintainer from his position). - Maybe have a timeout period (again, 6-12 months I think) that after that period a module is now considered (and flagged) "a community held module" which means any developer can request to be assigned as co-maintainer to it. - Of course, we need to make sure that new comers don't just take old modules (which work very good) and break them which makes it impossible for others to now use the functionality they sought in the module in the first place. - Maybe have developers apply once a year (reminder system, anyone?) to make sure their module is still under their sole authorship. Like, get a small email from the reminder system of PAUSE and just reply with an empty msg content. - The trickiest: what if I wrote a module, but I don't want to add to it, and I don't want anyone else touching it ever - I want it the way it is and that's it. Do we fork it? Do we each start patching various things on the system by our selves? That'd be nightmare, but... wouldn't it still be my right? I don't know about this, but I'm losing sleep over the philosophical aspects of it! :) (whoever knows the issue with ion3, knows what I mean) I'm just brainstorming here but this is behavior that exists for many of us and not once or twice we see mails that go through (at least) this list asking for any contact to a person who is authoring a certain module. I know I've tried reaching various people without asking here, so I'm guessing others as well, which means the number of people desperately searching an author to put in a few more lines of code (that they might have already have written for them) is greater than we see. Please people, if you find this interesting, reply. Lets discuss this as a community and try to make things better for ourselves! :) Sawyer.
