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.
