NEILB's Blog

This is a follow-up to last year's blog post, where I posted some charts to show how new CPAN users and distributions have changed over time. I meant to post this in January, but was repeatedly ambushed by yaks, and eventually decided it was too late. Then Olaf asked if I could show him updated charts with 2022 data, and I figured I might as well publish a belated report.

In the CPAN Report on 2021 I noted that there has been a steady decline in the number of new authors, releasing authors, and releases, year-on-year, for the last 8 years. In the conclusion, I noted one of the things that I thought would help is a "manual on how to become a good CPAN author". I wonder if we can use Hacktoberfest to get this started?

This is a follow-up to last year's blog post, where I posted some charts to show how new CPAN users and distributions have changed over time. I've updated the charts to include data for 2021, and added a new chart to see if it adds anything else to the picture (spoiler: not really). The executive summary is that CPAN creation is continuing to decline.

PAUSE ran out of diskspace this weekend, so we're asking everyone to delete old releases from their author directory. Every release you do to CPAN stays in your author directory until you choose to delete it. Sometimes you might want your old releases to stay available, but most of the time you could happily delete them (they're always available on BackPAN). Below I'll explain how you can do this.

We often talk about "The Perl Community", but I don't think it exists. Instead what we have is a loose, and at times fraught, federation of communities. Over the last few weeks I've been thinking and talking about this a lot, so I wanted to share some of those thoughts, and hear what others think. This is not me trying to tell you how things are, but how I see things, and also to outline some things that I think might help us be less fraught.

Sometimes you want to optionally use a module in your code: if it's available, then load it, but if not, you can still proceed. I had to do this recently, and used one of the common approaches, but have been thinking it would be nice if this were easier to do.

As part of the CPAN Report post I did recently, I looked at how recently distributions had their last release, and how that varied with the river position (number of dependent distributions). I've been playing with some other ideas related to this, to see if they'll help identify distributions that could do with some TLC.

CPAN was launched in 1995, so Perl developers have been sharing their code with each other for more than 25 years. In this post I'll share various charts that show how releases to CPAN have waxed and waned. I previously did a CPAN Report 2013, which as you'll see below, was when many measures were at or near their peak.

If you're using Net::Todoist I'd be interested in hearing from you. If you're using the Todoist todo-list app, and would be interested in using an API for it, then this might be of interest to you too. I've completely rewritten the module, changing the interface, and talking to more recent REST API. Should I release this under a new name, or not worry about back-compat? I'm leaning towards the latter.

The issue of logos regularly comes up with respect to Perl, and the problem of O'Reilly's ownership then does as well, with vague descriptions of the situation. I wanted to know what the real situation is, so I asked Tim O'Reilly.