> Being on the patch submitting side of this, I'll put in my 2 pence.
>
> For the last 2 years, I've been bugging one CPAN author to apply my patch
> that fixes a bug in RT. He says, "I've moved to GitHub. Fork my project and
> issue a pull request". [...]
I've got a few of those going on.
But in reviewing a bunch of modules recently, I've hit more of the following
case:
- no releases in a long time
- I submit things to RT with no response (usually other tickets already
there)
- I email the author, and get no response
I've come up with bugs for a number of modules, some of which I'm now going
through
the adoption process on, but some I'm figuring it's just not worth it, which is
a shame.
> Technology doesn't make people interested in old projects when there's new
> shiny to work on.
Spot on.
If someone comes along and thinks "hey, this would be useful, and I can improve
it",
we should make it easier for the baton to be passed on, as it will improve the
overall quality
of CPAN.
All the while still respecting the original author [1]
> Or is it me? What's the matter? Do I stink?
Well, to borrow your phrase, given the demographic, you probably do ;-)
This pledge is one of the ideas which came from reviewing a bunch of modules,
which I'm presenting at the London Perl Workshop. You going?
Neil
[1] I like the statement on respecting the original author in the PAUSE rules:
http://pause.perl.org/pause/query?ACTION=pause_04about
You have to realize that the author has probably invested a signficiant amount
of time into writing the code in the first place and then gone through the
additional work of making it available to others via CPAN free of charge.
Therefore, it is crucial to be very polite when asking him or her for
co-maintenance permissions. Politeness, however, does not suffice. Particularly
when maintaining a module for which you received co-maintenance permissions
from the admins (as opposed to being appointed by the author himself), you are
*required* to respect the work and design of the author.
