On Sep 2, 2008, at 4:23 PM, chromatic wrote:
Changing the way some 6000 registered authors work to meet the needs
of one
particular domain purportedly for their benefit seems to be the
wrong way
around, at least to me.
Does anyone on CPAN Testers have any idea what their constituencies
want?
Nobody has EVER come to me and said "What would you like us to do for
you?" I just get mail complaining that (for example) my modules don't
run under Perl 5.6.1 because I don't specifically protect against
running under Perl 5.6.1.
Also, as far as I know, CPAN Testers has never asked the readers of
the CPAN Testers or search.cpan.org "What would you like us to do for
you?" The features in CPAN Testers are 100% self-created dogma.
Has anyone outside of CPAN Testers asked for my modules to complain if
you try to install them under Perl 5.6.1? Ever?
I'm not against the idea of CPAN Testers. I'm really not. What's
frustrating is that as far as I can tell, the efforts of CPAN Testers
are entirely self-serving. They are for the benefit and pleasure of
the people running CPAN Testers itself, not for either of its
purported constituencies. As it stands now, can someone explain to me
why I shouldn't ask Graham to remove the link to CPAN Testers from my
search.cpan.org pages because it's useless noisy spam?
I see CPAN Testers being like Consumer Reports magazine. It doesn't
have to be on the side of the makers of the products, but it has a
readership that tells it "This is what I'm interested in."
CPAN Testers could be a real voice for the user. It could find out, a
la Consumer Reports, that people are most frustrated with such-and-
such, and these 10 modules are the best in that, and these 10 are the
worst. THAT would be something.
xoxo,
Andy
--
Andy Lester => [EMAIL PROTECTED] => www.petdance.com => AIM:petdance
