NEILB's Blog

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.

When working on something, when you hit a problem don't ask for help right away. Work at it until you feel stuck. And when you're stuck, work at it for 15 more minutes, even if you feel like you're banging your head against the wall. And then ask for help.

I'm working on a Perl wrapper for the BambooHR API, and using this as a learning experiment: deliberately trying different approaches and iterating on the design. One aspect of the design is the bit that actually makes the HTTP requests. This started off as part of the main class, but here I describe different refactorings I tried, learning a bit more about Moo as I went.

In a previous post I talked about deleting distributions from CPAN, and how there are plenty of dists that CPAN would be better without. In that I said I was going to start looking for candidate dists for removal. The first such dist, containing Win32::FUtils, has now been removed from CPAN (on 19th Jan 2014).

I've just released a new version of HTML::Summary, which I adopted from Ave Wrigley (AWRIGLEY) and Tony Rose (TGROSE). The main reason I did this was to resolve a mix-up in PAUSE permissions, that was spotted by Brian Cassidy (BRICAS). But I was also coming full circle: I previously worked with Ave and Tony, and wrote the first version of HTML::Summary (with Tony), which never made it to CPAN.

I've just released Text::Markdown::PerlExtensions to CPAN. This is a subclass of Text::Markdown that provides extensions for referring to Perl things using a pod-style syntax. I wrote it to use in bs, my blogging engine. At the moment it has formatting codes for referring to CPAN modules and authors.

While creating the CPAN Report I decided to try and create the plots with as many different CPAN distributions as possible. This turned out to be very frustrating, and in the end I only used two packages.

I think there are times when a distribution should be removed from CPAN entirely. If a distribution doesn't appear to be used, and there are other dists providing the same functionality which are being used, then I think we can consider removing it from CPAN. In this post I'll describe why it's good for CPAN if appropriate distributions are removed, how to decide what distributions should be removed, and suggest a process for distribution removal.

I've extended the CPAN adoption list to factor in results from CPAN Testers. This caused 6 dists to move up into the top 20.

I've added an adoption leaderboard to my CPAN adoption list. Kudos to Ron Savage who chipping away at the adoption list.