Kirrily Robert wrote:
In September 2001, apparently all aglow in the excitement of all the
talk that was going on about testing and whatnot, I wrote a module
called CPAN::Test::Reporter.
(http://search.cpan.org/~skud/CPAN-Test-Reporter-0.02/) Looking at it,
I have no idea what I was thinking or why I thought it was necessary at
the time. The only hint is in the credits where I say that it's based
on the cpantest script by Kurt Starsinic. Presumably I thought it would
be useful to have a modular version of it.
I'm pretty sure nobody uses it (CPANTS reports that it's not a
dependency for any other module). It looks like Test::Reporter is a
newer module that does what I was trying to do, and is more up to date.
What I want to know is, should I just bin it? Or might it, in fact, be
useful to someone somehow? Or is it just bad form to completely delete
CPAN modules? I guess I could update it with a new version that says
"Don't use me."
If it has never really worked at all and is just broken, remove it.
If it DID work just fine and there's a need to keep it around for
potential legacy users do the following.
1. Change the abstract to "(DEPRECATED) ..."
2. Increment the version
3. Put a big bold section at the top of DESCRIPTION that says why it was
deprecated and what people should use instead.
4. Put a warning in the Makefile.PL that says the module is deprecated.
print "------------------------------------------------------";
print "This module has been deprecated, use Foo::Bar instead.";
print "------------------------------------------------------";
sleep 5;
... or something like that. Then continue installing anyway.
4. Release the new version to CPAN.
