On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 6:03 AM, sawyer x <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Perhaps we do need some added guidelines to CPAN.
My 2 cents: CPAN is fundamentally a free-wheeling, fairly anarchic
place run by volunteers and containing the work of volunteers.
Anything that imposes greater restrictions (a) requires more work for
maintainers and (b) decreases the freedom to innovate. For both
reasons, more rules or guidelines are to be avoided.
> The fact that we have multiple "UNAUTHORIZED" releases (that are still
> easily found - something before the "authorized" releases - which is
> confusing),
This is a function of search.cpan.org -- these modules do not get
indexed by CPAN itself and can't easily be installed by end-users.
But perhaps there needs to be better documentation on the subject,
e.g. "What is an UNAUTHORIZED release?"
> the fact that many modules that were abandoned are still used and the patches
> in the bug reports are piling up when you just need someone to apply them
> and have them tested,
Others have describe the process for taking over abandoned
distributions. It works quite well. I've inherited a few things that
I liked but needed to fix. Authors are volunteers and fixing things
takes work. If it's important enough to you to have fixes, then
volunteer to take over.
If you don't have that kind of time and you want to warn people about
abandon-ware that shouldn't be used unless, submit a negative review.
> the fact that we have a lot of forks for
> abandoned modules,
I don't see how that's a problem any more than the fact that we have
lots of similar sounding modules doing similar things. Diversity is
strength. Would it be better that people took them over? Maybe. Or
maybe not. A fork allows things an API to evolve in a potentially
incompatible direction without screwing those whose code depends on
the original version. So who is to say when a fork is or isn't the
right approach? In my view -- only the end users. If a fork is a
good idea, it'll get used. If not, it wont.
> the fact that some modules are so outdated they won't work on any
> standard system,
Have you seen the CPAN Testers line on search.cpan.org? Particularly
the "Perl/Platform Version Matrix"? There is information available
about where things work.
> and there's no way to parse them out in the search ("give me only modules
> which
> work on 5.8 and hold the ketchup").
Again, are you talking search.cpan.org or CPAN? Nothing prevents you
from writing your own search website that merges results from CPAN
Testers.
>I really think it's not just CPAN that needs
> revamping, it's the fact that it seems like we've overlooked a
> bloating module archive
> that is imperative to the community and as a community I think we need
> to look into
> it some more.
>
> I'm not bitching, I just think we can improve things a lot.
You are bitching. Moreover, you're complaining that "the community"
needs to do something and trying to set some direction. But, the
community in this case is made up of volunteers who write code. A lot
of the extras you see on search.cpan.org like ratings, dependency map,
perl/platform version matrix and the discussion forum were made by
people with an itch to scratch.
So if you have an itch, write some code and see if people like it. Or
write some text for the FAQ. That's going to be much more effective
than jawboning people for change.
-- David
