Re: Give up your modules!
Ken Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The fact that they made their contribution in the first place, and people found it useful, seems like it should be honored rather than vilified. I agree fully. That said, there ought to be a way for the community to move forward without having the original author be the bottleneck. Maybe it is just a little thing, but it might be a small step forward: how about adding a CPAN flag indicating the author has given up interest in maintaining a specific module? This makes it easy for an author to formally give up a module, without having to find a new maintainer first, which may be a tedious process. Should, in some later stage, anyone be interested in taking over maintainenance she is free to do so. -- Johan
Re: Give up your modules!
On Wed, 23 Aug 2006 14:28:13 +0100 Nicholas Clark [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 06:52:26PM +0800, imacat wrote: But this ain't right. Crypt-Cracklib is critical to security and user management, Crypt-Rijndael is the current US governmental standard encryption algorithm, and x86_64 is the contemporary architech. It's just not right that they don't work. What would you consider to be the right that should be happening here? Answering that will make answering your next question easier: Working. Sorry, but I don't get the point of your question. -- imacat ^_*' [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Key: http://www.imacat.idv.tw/me/pgpkey.txt Tavern IMACAT's http://www.imacat.idv.tw/ Woman's Voice http://www.wov.idv.tw/ TLUG List Manager http://www.linux.org.tw/mailman/listinfo/tlug pgpuBmxdIZBsk.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Give up your modules!
On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 09:09:55 +0200, Johan Vromans [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: That said, there ought to be a way for the community to move forward without having the original author be the bottleneck. Maybe it is just a little thing, but it might be a small step forward: how about adding a CPAN flag indicating the author has given up interest in maintaining a specific module? This makes it easy for an author to formally give up a module, without having to find a new maintainer first, which may be a tedious process. Should, in some later stage, anyone be interested in taking over maintainenance she is free to do so. That's what the DSLIP status already knows as S (Support Level): a (abandoned) -- andreas
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Re: Give up your modules!
On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 03:16:22PM +0800, imacat wrote: On Wed, 23 Aug 2006 14:28:13 +0100 Nicholas Clark [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 06:52:26PM +0800, imacat wrote: But this ain't right. Crypt-Cracklib is critical to security and user management, Crypt-Rijndael is the current US governmental standard encryption algorithm, and x86_64 is the contemporary architech. It's just not right that they don't work. What would you consider to be the right that should be happening here? Answering that will make answering your next question easier: Working. Sorry, but I don't get the point of your question. Thanks. See below: On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 06:52:26PM +0800, imacat wrote: I'm not a skilled C/XS programmer, or I would consider taking over them. Can anybody have advice on this issue? The author made these modules available to you for free. So any support you get is a bonus. In addition, the author has made the source code available to you for free. This means that you are not reliant on him/her for support - you have more options: * Fix the modules yourself * Employ someone to fix the modules for you Given that you have said that you do not currently have the skills to fix these modules, your choices seem to be learn the skills, or employ someone. You seem to be assuming that someone owes you a fix for these modules. For free. I'm not sure why you are assuming this. This is why I asked you what was not right. From your answer what seems to be not right is the modules do not continue to be maintained for free in perpetuity. Nicholas Clark
Re: Give up your modules!
On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 09:41:31 +0200, Johan Vromans [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Andreas J. Koenig) writes: That's what the DSLIP status already knows as S (Support Level): a (abandoned) Yes, but instead of abandoned I was thinking of scheduled to be abandoned, where the original DSLIP flag still has value. Maybe this is a bit too much of fine-tuning... I'd think so. How many modules are actually marked abandoned? mysql select modid,userid from mods where stats='a' and mlstatus='list' ; +---+--+ | modid | userid | +---+--+ | Agent | SPURKIS | | Quiz::Question| RFOLEY | | Unix::UserAdmin | JZAWODNY | | Be::Query | TSPIN| | Image::ParseGIF | BENL | | Perlbug | RFOLEY | | SimpleCDB | BENL | | Module::MakefilePL::Parse | RRWO | | Win32::Share | MNIKHIL | | Mozilla::Backup | RRWO | | Lingua::EL::Poly2Mono | SPROUT | +---+--+ 11 rows in set (0.00 sec) -- andreas
Re: Give up your modules!
- Original Message From: Ken Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] Having a name and shame mentality about this is IMO wrong. I hope you're not saying I suggested that. I did not name anyone. I didn't ask for a list of modules whose authors we should hunt down. I only asked for those authors to find *some* way of ensuring that their users can get support if the author does not have the time or inclination to do so. It's not too hard to find widely used modules which for various reasons, would be hard to switch away from yet are effectively abandoned (which is as close as I'll come to naming and shaming). That list should be left as a *private* exercise for the reader. Cheers, Ovid
Re: Give up your modules!
On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 09:46:33 +0100 Nicholas Clark [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 06:52:26PM +0800, imacat wrote: I'm not a skilled C/XS programmer, or I would consider taking over them. Can anybody have advice on this issue? The author made these modules available to you for free. So any support you get is a bonus. You seem to be assuming that someone owes you a fix for these modules. For free. Oh I see. You may not know me. I personally have submit numerous patches, bug reports, tests reports, debug reports to numerous packages, perl modules or not. You may not know how much time I have spent on submitting patches and bug reports to all kinds of free software packages only in 2006. There are still 10+ bug reports by me hanging on rt. Unlike most CPAN tester robots, I even take time on modules that hang in their test suite and hence did not sent any test report, and report them manually, even that I'm not using them at all. I did what I can as best as possible, to help the community. I may not be famous, might not be widely known due to not showing up on meetings all over the world, for I'm not that rich, but I'm not that kind of stupid and greedy newbie you described so ugly. But for this issue, I really have 3 choices: 1. Ignoring it, and nobody in the whole world will know. After all, I can disable that part of code that uses Crypt-Cracklib, and Crypt-Rijndael has a non-perfect replacement. I can write a whole content management system with a million lines from nothing. What's so hard to merely disable using a module? 2. Address this issue to the public and see if someone encounter the same problem with the same modules and see what we can do. 3. Drop my current schedule, my job and my school and jump into the world of C/XS, and die for no income to pay my dinner and bill and rent. I choose 2. 2 is the most reasonable and positive choise to me currently. Any problem? -- imacat ^_*' [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Key: http://www.imacat.idv.tw/me/pgpkey.txt Tavern IMACAT's http://www.imacat.idv.tw/ Woman's Voice http://www.wov.idv.tw/ TLUG List Manager http://www.linux.org.tw/mailman/listinfo/tlug pgpwVfQniO5W3.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Give up your modules!
On 24 Aug 2006, at 08:33, Andreas J. Koenig wrote: That's what the DSLIP status already knows as S (Support Level): a (abandoned) I guess the problem is that there's not a pervasive culture of people setting their modules to abandoned when they decide to abandon them. I imagine that a lot of time can pass between someone maintaining a module for the last time and eventually deciding that they aren't supporting it - human nature being what it is. -- Andy Armstrong, hexten.net
Re: Give up your modules!
On Aug 24, 2006, at 4:31 AM, Ovid wrote: - Original Message From: Ken Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] Having a name and shame mentality about this is IMO wrong. I hope you're not saying I suggested that. I did not name anyone. I didn't ask for a list of modules whose authors we should hunt down. That's true, it's more the shame part I'm objecting to, and I latched on to that meme from somewhere out in pop culture. I only asked for those authors to find *some* way of ensuring that their users can get support if the author does not have the time or inclination to do so. I guess that's true, but I bet those authors aren't going to be reading the module-authors list much either. -Ken
Re: Give up your modules!
imacat wrote: On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 09:46:33 +0100 Oh I see. You may not know me. I personally have submit numerous patches, bug reports, tests reports, debug reports to numerous packages, perl modules or not. You may not know how much time I have spent on submitting patches and bug reports to all kinds of free software packages only in 2006. There are still 10+ bug reports by me hanging on rt. Unlike most CPAN tester robots, I even take time on modules that hang in their test suite and hence did not sent any test report, and report them manually, even that I'm not using them at all. I did what I can as best as possible, to help the community. I may not be famous, might not be widely known due to not showing up on meetings all over the world, for I'm not that rich, but I'm not that kind of stupid and greedy newbie you described so ugly. I want to endorse imacat on her contributions. She runs one of the best smoke testers on cpan-testers: it's really strict and seems to catch lots of people out on subtle dependency problems. She's also been very responsive to questions I've had about failed test reports. These are contributions I value highly. Regards, David Golden
Re: Give up your modules!
On Thursday 24 August 2006 15:43, Dana Hudes wrote: Just because I haven't had time to update Net::Whois in years doesn't mean I haven't got plans or indeed scraps of code. It actually is an interesting case because its really a wrapper around external service which refuses to standardize (despite efforts toward that) and changes willy-nilly. It needs a complete rewrite to address the needs of today's registrar lookups. I don't have time for it but I have plans for it. I have had someone try to steal the maintainership out from under me. That wasn't nice. Especially since his fixes didn't solve the underlying issues. I believe he took my code, which in turn was based on Chip's original version, and eventually made a new module with documentation excoriating me for not letting him take Net::Whois away from me (around this same time, I was a p/t college professor and had a research student working to implement my plans for a new version so you can imagine I was really rather annoyed at the hijack attempt). This hijacker actually lied to the CPAN librarian saying that I had approved this transfer. fortunately, I got a notice of the change and protested and it was reversed. Recently, someone proposed to co-maintain and I have asked him to send me a development plan of some kind outlining what it is that he wants to do. He agreed that this was a reasonable approach but has never gotten back to me with the plan. Finding a new maintainer isn't as easy as it sounds we are all busy. then of course there are people outside the module author community who, despite using free software, see no reason to spend any of THEIR time contributing back to the community with actual code. Instead they go on about how its great to get this stuff for free -- as in $0 -- and that's it. Best way to get a maintainer to resume interest is to address motivation. Monetary support makes time available if the maintainer has any interest in the topic. Maybe it would be a good idea to spend some TPF (or whatever) grants on giving bounties for resuming maintenance of several critically unmaintained CPAN modules? With their authors' permissions, of course. Well, at least XML::LibXML is maintained again. :-) In any case, I should note that I'm aware of one important module which has over 20 pending bugs in rt.cpan.org (one of them with a patch by me, and probably others with patches), whose author refuses to take the time to close the bugs. (And yes, he's still alive.). If these bugs are not real, they should still be closed, and several of them are in fact real. Regards, Shlomi Fish - Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage:http://www.shlomifish.org/ Chuck Norris wrote a complete Perl 6 implementation in a day but then destroyed all evidence with his bare hands, so no one will know his secrets.
Smoke (was Re: Give up your modules!)
On 24 Aug 2006, at 13:59, David Golden wrote: I want to endorse imacat on her contributions. She runs one of the best smoke testers on cpan-testers: it's really strict and seems to catch lots of people out on subtle dependency problems. She's also been very responsive to questions I've had about failed test reports. These are contributions I value highly. That reminds me of something I've been meaning to investigate - is there a guide anywhere or a starting point about running smoke. I'm running smoke on two machines here - but they're both out of the box setups and I'd like to provide more benefit if possible. What specifically is imacat doing that makes her an example of best practice and how may others do something similar? -- Andy Armstrong, hexten.net
Re: Smoke (was Re: Give up your modules!)
Andy Armstrong wrote: What specifically is imacat doing that makes her an example of best practice and how may others do something similar? She would have to answer that definitively, but from what I can tell, it looks like she might be using an isolated, fresh perl installation (that isn't even in the $PATH) that gets reset after each smoke. From test reports I've seen, it looks like the whole non-core prerequisite chain gets installed from scratch for each module tested. Regards, David
Re: Smoke (was Re: Give up your modules!)
On 24 Aug 2006, at 14:13, David Golden wrote: She would have to answer that definitively, but from what I can tell, it looks like she might be using an isolated, fresh perl installation (that isn't even in the $PATH) that gets reset after each smoke. From test reports I've seen, it looks like the whole non-core prerequisite chain gets installed from scratch for each module tested. Ah right; that makes sense, thanks. I've got snapshots of out-of-the- box 5.8.8 and 5.9.4 installs that I use for testing locally - I'll have a look at hooking that up to smoke. Cheers :) -- Andy Armstrong, hexten.net
Re: Smoke (was Re: Give up your modules!)
On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 14:05:34 +0100
Andy Armstrong [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On 24 Aug 2006, at 13:59, David Golden wrote:
What specifically is imacat doing that makes her an example of best
practice and how may others do something similar?
This may be off-topic. I do not know what is best practice, but
this is my configuration. It's a result of my repeatly experiment on
the issues I encountered. There may still be improvement.
The commented force issue is already submitted to rt.cpan.org is
dealed. It will be fixed in the next release of CPANPLUS.
http://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=20640
Thanks to Robert Rothenberg on his CPAN-YACSmoke. But it's a little
tricky to tweak the CPANPLUS::Configure instance used by CPAN::YACSmoke.
This is not documented. From peeping into the code there are 2
instances of CPANPLUS::Configure inside. Both are effective. Robert
may not be aware that someone might try to alter CPANPLUS::Configure
after initializing the CPAN::YACSmoke object.
Hope this helps. Please tell me if you need any more information.
===
$smoke = new CPAN::YACSmoke;
# No storable -- always test packages, no matter tested before or not
$smoke-{conf}-set_conf(storable, 0);
$smoke-{cpan}-configure_object-set_conf(storable, 0);
# Force test even if been tested
# See CPANPLUS::Dist::MM. force make test always passed
#$smoke-{force} = 1;
#$smoke-{conf}-set_conf(force, 1);
#$smoke-{cpan}-configure_object-set_conf(force, 1);
# Send the test result
$smoke-{cpantest} = 1;
$smoke-{conf}-set_conf(cpantest, 1);
$smoke-{cpan}-configure_object-set_conf(cpantest, 1);
# Follow the prerequisites automatically
$smoke-{prereqs} = 1;
$smoke-{conf}-set_conf(prereqs, 1);
$smoke-{cpan}-configure_object-set_conf(prereqs, 1);
# Be verbose
$smoke-{verbose} = 1;
$smoke-{conf}-set_conf(verbose, 1);
$smoke-{cpan}-configure_object-set_conf(verbose, 1);
# Use http://www.cpan.org/ as source
$smoke-{conf}-set_conf(hosts, [{
'host' = 'www.cpan.org',
'path' = '/',
'scheme' = 'http'
}]);
$smoke-{cpan}-configure_object-set_conf(hosts, [{
'host' = 'www.cpan.org',
'path' = '/',
'scheme' = 'http'
}]);
==
--
Best regards,
imacat ^_*' [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: Give up your modules!
David Golden wrote: I want to endorse imacat on her contributions. She runs one of the best smoke testers on cpan-testers: it's really strict and seems to catch lots of people out on subtle dependency problems. She's also been very responsive to questions I've had about failed test reports. These are contributions I value highly. I second David's remarks. When I was revising ExtUtils::ModuleMaker at this time last year, imacat's tests caught more, and more subtle, problems than anyone else's. And I noted that in a talk I gave several times over the last year, including at YAPC in Chicago. jimk
