The CPAN Pull Request Challenge for 2016

CPAN-PRC Wed 30 December 2015

I'm going to run another CPAN Pull Request Challenge in 2016, but with a few differences from the 2015 challenge. Here I'll outline the challenge and the differences.

On the 1st day of each month I'll email participants a CPAN distribution, and they'll have one month to submit a Pull Request (PR). The following month, I'll assign a new distribution to everyone who has completed the previous month.

Differences from 2015's challenge:

So far I've emailed 824 CPAN authors, asking if they're happy for one or more of their CPAN distributions to be assigned. These were distributions that (a) have a github repo, and (b) have one or more downstream dependents. At the moment 139 authors have agreed, but I'm hoping that I'll get a surge of positive replies after the Christmas break. That's why it's invite-only at the moment.

I'm open to bribery though, if you really want to take part. If you set up a repeating annual donation to the CPAN Testers fund for £20 or more, then I'll sign you up (once I've had confirmation from Mark Keating of your donation).

Why opt-in on authors?

One of the most discouraging aspects for 2015 participants was getting no response from authors, either after sending email, or submitting a PR.

Hopefully, making it opt-in will make the authors of assigned dists more likely to engage with participants, resulting in happier participants, and more and higher-quality PRs.

My challenge

I'm not taking part myself this year. My challenge is to find 12 or more on-river distributions that have a github repo, but where the github repo isn't listed in the dist's metadata (META.yml and/or META.json). I'll submit a PR to fix that.

If there aren't at least 12 such dists (I'm pretty sure there will be), then I'll try and get some authors to create github repos!

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