Hi Phil, Thanks for your reply and honest appraisal of the situation.
> This is very sad, and as the original author of the code, I would like to > apologize on behalf of those who have inherited in from me. Except that I > have *NO* idea who that is. I wrote and owned this code from 1998 to 2002. > Hildo also left the project and Morgan Stanley a few years later, and the > engineering team that manages the MQSeries infrastructure Hildo and I > designed and deployed are the ones responsible for the CPAN distro now. > That team *was* pretty good, but they entire team quit or changed projects in > 2012, which explains the final release date. > > Now, I am going to be characteristically blunt here: all the good engineers > are gone from that team, and I don't think they are giving ANY priority to > maintaining the CPAN distribution, because none of them have any clue how. > If you have the skills and the interest in taking this over, I would be more > than happy to help broker getting the ownership transferred. If you can help us get approval from “the right place in Morgan Stanley”, that would be great. > If push comes to shove, I am pretty sure that if Hildo and I endorsed it, > the CPAN maintainers would make the change. I should have made clear in my first response — I am one of the PAUSE admins. > […] Now, I honestly think that the team in question is so deep underwater > with everything we created (that infrastructure and the management > application we built are perhaps the most successful work of my career, and > they still use it), that they will most likely be thrilled to give this up. > > Anyway, if it is not obvious, please keep this discussion entirely > confidential for now. Just so you’re aware, the PAUSE admins mailing list (modules@perl.org <mailto:modules@perl.org>) has been copied on these emails. There is a public archive of these emails, but it’s not likely that people will stumble on those archives. If you want to continue this discussion off that list, just let us know. > I am putting the priorities of the open source community before those of my > employers here, and so taking a bit of political risk by doing so. I am, > for lack of clearly better judgment, working at MS again right now, so I > would appreciate you NOT sharing this discussion publicly until it is > appropriate to do so. This is also why I am in the perfect spot to broker > the ownership change. I appreciate you doing this. > reach out to Golden, and inquire about the process here, as I don't think you > will ever see another release if we don't, so I will bring him into this > discussion as well. Please give me about a week to get the internal > feedback on this. Since the code is copyright Morgan Stanley, and was last released from a Morgan Stanley account, we’ll need some approval from MS to hand over maintenance. If you can get approval and forward it to us, I can then give co-maint to Thorsten on all of the MQSeries modules. This doesn’t need a formal signature, but once you’ve spoken to the right person in MS, you could send an email to us and cc that person, with a simple email along the lines of: Dear PAUSE Admins, I’ve spoken to XX at Morgan Stanley, who is happy for co-maint permissions to be granted to Thorsten Hirsch on the MQSeries distribution. I’ve copied XX on this email. Phil Given Thorsten’s recent email, it will hopefully be relatively easy to make a good case for this, as it’s going to result in active maintenance and bug fixing (I notice there’s at least one patch from Thorsten in the RT bug queue for the dist). They’re clearly dependent on this module in production, and have a good CPAN pedigree. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help. Cheers, Neil
