Sounds good to me ... I hereby accept this covenant for the modules I maintain, present and future, until such time as I indicate otherwise in email to modules@perl.org
On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 12:13 AM, Neil Bowers <n...@bowers.com> wrote: > A week ago I posted a proposal for a voluntary pledge, which CPAN > module authors could sign up to. With Bill Ward's tweak to the wording, > the discussion on per-distribution stating, and generalising the RT point: > > I hereby give modules@perl.org permission to grant co-maintainership > to [% distribution %], if all the following conditions are met: > > (1) I haven't released the module for a year or more > (2) There are outstanding issues in the module's public bug tracker > (3) Email to my CPAN email address hasn't been answered after a month > (4) The requester wants to make worthwhile changes that will benefit CPAN > > In the event of my death, then the time-limits in (1) and (3) do not > apply. > > In the discussion on module-authors, and talking to people at the London > Perl Workshop (LPW): about 60% thought it was a good idea, 20% a bad idea, > and > 20% indifferent. Most of the 'bad' being "it works that way already". > > Talking to people at LPW, a number commented (paraphrasing): > > Just email the author, wait a month, > then push modules@perl.org for a handover > > Which to me doesn't quite match the spirit of the PAUSE "taking over" > process > described at http://pause.perl.org/pause/query?ACTION=pause_04about > > I recently took over a module after 2 months, during which I tried a number > of ways to track down the author, mailed various other people, and posted > to module-authors. That seemed appropriate, because the author had clearly > put a lot of thought and effort into this, and his other modules. > > So, I went to Andreas Koenig, since he has more experience of module > handovers > than most of us! The group behind modules@perl.org have to balance two > sides: > respecting individual authors, and helping the continued development of > CPAN. > If none of the group know the current author, they have to err on > the author's side, not CPAN: > > "I've heard too many upset developers going berserk because they felt > [their module was expropriated]" > > Asked whether he thought an explicit pledge would be useful, Andreas said: > > "An explicit statement in a distribution like the one in your picture > would make our lives a lot easier" > > As a number of others commented, Andreas feels it should be stated on > a per-distribution basis, and not per-author. > > In a side-discussion, it was pointed out that sometimes an author would > be happy for someone else to take over the module. > In this case the covenant would become: > > I hereby give modules@perl.org permission to grant lead authorship > to [% distribution %], if the following conditions are met: > > (1) There are outstanding issues in the module's public bug tracker > (2) The requester wants to make worthwhile changes that will benefit CPAN > > There are at least three ways this could be provided: > > (a) a file included in the distribution. Eg Covenant.txt > (b) text in the README > (c) a feature on PAUSE, where you can select the "ownership status" > or similar > > The problem with (c), is that it's not very public; the information needs > to be closely associated with the distribution itself. To make things > easy for all involved, I think (a) is probably the best. The downside with > this is that having lost interest in one of your distributions, you now > have to do a release to let the (Perl) world know. The alternative would > be to email the covenant to modules@perl.org: that's publicly archived, > so your covenant could be found, especially once a convention > has been established. > > -- Check out my LEGO blog at http://www.brickpile.com Follow/friend me: facebook.com/billward • flickr.com/photos/billward • twitter.com/williamward
