one consistent trouble spot in the parrot release process is the CPAN upload process. often times, we have trouble with perl modules that have been added, deleted, or renamed causing the release to be marked as 'unauthorized'. dealing with unauthorized releases involves intervention from a pause admin.
the reason we run into trouble at all is because we're indexing modules in the parrot repo. with the exception of a few (Parrot::Embed comes to mind), i don't see a need to index any of the modules. they're all parrot-specific, and we don't use CPAN's bug tracker or rating systems to maintain those modules. therefore, i'd like to make parrot 0.6.1 the last release that's ever listed as unauthorized due to module ownership problems. let's update the metadata to refrain from indexing modules under the Parrot:: namespace, except where it makes sense. also, i'd like to automate more of the release process. currently, we have a period of time where the link on the website for the most recent parrot will point to the previous release of parrot, until the new distro propagates to the cpan mirrors. in order to overcome this problem, and to automate one more release step, i propose the following: write a piece of code that watches http://svn.perl.org/parrot/tags/ for a new tag that matches /RELEASE_.*/, and when that occurs, run 'make release VERSION=`cat version`', and updates a link on the website to point to that tarball. we can then use that tarball to do a final test, and upload it to cpan. comments welcome. ~jerry
