On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 04:29:02PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote:
On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 04:57:49PM -0700, Mark Hedges wrote:
Devel::Size module seems to be broken in 5.20.0. No response from
developers. No work for a year or so.
What's the process to address a broken module that the developers won't fix?
http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html#How_adopt_module
The current maintainer is Nick Clark, who is active in the community. I
don't know how long ago you tried to contact him, but perhaps he's just
busy on other stuff.
Work is currently stupidly busy*, and home is differently busy. :-(
I'm aware that there are now some test failures, which I had hoped to have
time to get to and haven't yet. I wasn't aware that it was actually in a
dependency chain. Sorry about that.
The problem is that historically there have multiple occasions with the
module where patches have been submitted (and in several cases accepted)
that were wrong. Sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly.
In particular, it's easy to write tests that produce a number. It's much
harder to write tests that actually test what they think that they are
testing, and testing the wrong number isn't useful.
IIRC one recent patch sent by a third party ended up being totally wrong in
its assumptions, and fixing the problem properly took somewhat over 5 hours
of serious concentration.
The problem is finding a block of 5 hours.**
Nicholas Clark
* This will not be tolerated indefinitely.
** Work currently has pseudo-timesheets submitted daily. Borrowing 5 hours in
a day is hard to hide. Borrowing 5 hours in a week would not be impossible.
