NEILB's Blog

I've released the first version of CPAN::ReverseDependencies, which given the name of one CPAN distribution, will return a list of the names of other CPAN distributions that use it. This uses the MetaCPAN API, and is based on some code that I think I got from OALDERS.

I should start by saying that this is mainly Kent Fredric's fault. He hacked on my previous graphing hack, and goaded me with other ideas. This resulted in changes to the first script, and a new one which shows the top CPAN uploaders, either of all time, or a specific year.

The NAME section in the pod for your module(s) provides a one-line description of your module, often referred to as the abstract. Make sure all of your modules have an abstract, particularly the lead module in each distribution. And make sure it follows the convention, otherwise tools won't find it, including MetaCPAN.

Looking at Questhub this evening, I saw BOOK's quest, where he included an ascii graph of his releases per year. I asked him on IRC how he created the graph, but I didn't get a reply in time, so wrote a script to do it. What does your graph look like?

CPAN Tip lists all CPAN authors who have a Gittip account. More accurately it lists all CPAN authors who have linked their Gittip account with their MetaCPAN account, as described here.

BOOK and I both recently adopted a distribution each from TOMI, URI-Title and URI-Find-Simple respectively. We got talking about adoptions, and BOOK wondered whether you could automatically identify distributions that had been adopted. A while back I briefly thought about that too, so we chatted about an initial approach. Here I describe that approach, and the code created to try it. Just so I'm clear, the blame for what follows can be put on BOOK.

When you make changes to your dist, please note all of them in the Changes file. It may seem like overkill, and a burden, but once you get into the habit it will become just part of your way of working. And you may save time for others.

Last year I created PAUSE::Packages, which lets you iterate over all dists that PAUSE believes are still on CPAN. For a number of projects, including the CPAN Report 2013, I need to iterate over all releases of all dists. Yesterday I made the first release of CPAN::ReleaseHistory, which makes it easy to do that, in a similar way to PAUSE::Packages.

WebService::BambooHR provides an interface to the API for BambooHR.com. BambooHR is a commercial web-based HR information system: a company can use it to manage information about its employees and handle various HR related tasks. This module provides access to a subset of the API.

When adopting a module, one of the steps is to email the author / current maintainer and ask if you can adopt his or her module. Here's a template for that email, to help grease the adoption wheels. Thanks to BOOK, whose laziness gumption prompted this.