Quality metrics for the head of the CPAN River

CPAN River Tue 26 January 2016

In a series of previous posts ( 1, 2, 3 ) I had a look at some metrics for measuring the river quality of distributions. This post presents those metrics for the distributions at the head of the river: those distributions which have 10,000 downstream dependents or greater.

Firstly, here's summary data for the 45 distributions, in decreasing order of number of downstream dependents. I didn't include that number to keep the width of the table down. Most of these are core dists (another indicator I might include in future versions of the table).

Distribution	Released by	min perl	Bugs		CPAN Testers				Kwalitee		META
Pod-Simple	MARCGREEN	N/A	4	5	0	0	0		1	2	Y	J
Data-Dumper	SMUELLER	N/A	18	-	3909	25	15	0.6%	5	4	Y	-
Test-Simple	EXODIST	5.006	28	27	0	0	0		1	1	Y	J
Scalar-List-Utils	PEVANS	N/A	28	0	5579	98	8	1.7%	1	2	Y	J
Test-Harness	LEONT	N/A	32	12	0	0	0		0	2	Y	J
podlators	RRA	5.006	4	0	0	0	0		0	0	Y	J
Test	JESSE	N/A	6	-	2833	0	1	0.0%	0	0	Y	J
ExtUtils-MakeMaker	BINGOS	5.006	29	24	0	0	0		0	2	Y	J
Carp	RJBS	N/A	6	-	0	0	0		1	2	Y	J
PathTools	RJBS	N/A	62	-	0	0	0		0	3	Y	J
parent	CORION	N/A	3	0	1721	0	0	0.0%	1	2	Y	J
Exporter	TODDR	N/A	0	-	1102	0	0	0.0%	4	2	Y	J
Encode	DANKOGAI	N/A	45	3	0	0	0		1	2	Y	J
IO	TODDR	N/A	34	-	332	8	1	2.3%	1	3	Y	-
constant	RJBS	N/A	0	-	729	0	0	0.0%	0	2	Y	J
File-Path	RICHE	N/A	1	1	0	0	0		0	2	Y	J
File-Temp	DAGOLDEN	5.006	10	1	0	0	0		2	3	Y	J
lib	SMUELLER	N/A	2	-	2177	4	4	0.2%	2	3	Y	-
version	JPEACOCK	5.006002	0	-	0	0	0		0	0	Y	J
Module-Load	BINGOS	N/A	4	1	1649	2	0	0.1%	0	1	Y	J
Module-Metadata	ETHER	5.006	11	6	0	0	0		1	2	Y	-
Locale-Maketext-Simple	JESSE	N/A	8	-	1823	60	0	3.2%	1	1	Y	-
Module-CoreList	BINGOS	N/A	6	-	0	0	0		0	2	Y	J
Params-Check	BINGOS	N/A	3	1	1891	2	1	0.1%	0	2	Y	J
Module-Load-Conditional	BINGOS	N/A	0	0	1114	0	0	0.0%	0	2	Y	J
IPC-Cmd	BINGOS	N/A	26	1	1476	121	0	7.6%	0	2	Y	-
base	RJBS	N/A	4	-	0	0	0		3	4	Y	J
Text-ParseWords	CHORNY	5.006	5	0	1021	0	0	0.0%	0	1	Y	J
Perl-OSType	DAGOLDEN	5.006	0	1	0	0	0		0	0	Y	J
ExtUtils-CBuilder	AMBS	N/A	0	0	0	0	0		1	2	Y	J
Getopt-Long	JV	N/A	11	-	0	0	0		0	0	-	-
XSLoader	SAPER	N/A	0	-	2366	249	0	9.5%	1	2	Y	J
JSON-PP	MAKAMAKA	N/A	13	3	1929	2	0	0.1%	0	3	Y	J
ExtUtils-ParseXS	SMUELLER	N/A	4	-	0	0	0		0	2	Y	J
CPAN-Meta-YAML	DAGOLDEN	5.008001	0	0	0	0	0		0	0	Y	J
CPAN-Meta-Requirements	DAGOLDEN	5.006	0	5	0	0	0		0	0	Y	J
Parse-CPAN-Meta	DAGOLDEN	5.008001	3	1	3647	0	0	0.0%	1	2	Y	J
CPAN-Meta	DAGOLDEN	5.008	5	23	3675	2	0	0.1%	0	0	Y	J
ExtUtils-Install	BINGOS	N/A	21	2	1234	7	0	0.6%	2	3	Y	J
ExtUtils-Manifest	ETHER	5.006	2	12	1302	0	0	0.0%	0	0	Y	J
Text-Abbrev	FLORA	5.005	0	0	0	0	0		2	2	Y	J
Module-Build	LEONT	5.006001	24	12	0	0	0		0	0	Y	J
if	ETHER	N/A	1	-	0	0	0		3	2	Y	J
MIME-Base64	GAAS	5.004	0	0	0	0	0		1	2	Y	J
Try-Tiny	ETHER	5.006	0	0	0	0	0		0	0	Y	J

Some explanation:

In the Bugs column, the lefthand number is the count of RT issues, and the right-hand is the number of github issues, or '-' if there isn't a github repo for the dist.
The CPAN Testers column is: passes, fails, unknowns, and then the percentage of fails.
The Kwalitee column has the number of core metrics failed, and then the number of extra metrics failed.
The META column has a Y if the dist has a META.yml, and a J if the dist has a META.json.

One obvious follow-on question, which at least Helmut asked: what are the kwalitee metrics involved. So I wrote another script to build a summary table of the metrics:

The most commonly failed metrics are:

Distribution doesn't use warnings
Distribution metadata doesn't declare min perl version

Now I've got this data, I'm going to start working through the distributions, seeing which ones can be fixed, and raising bugs or submitting pull requests, as appropriate.

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Quality metrics for the head of the CPAN River