NEILB's Blog

Adopting a module on CPAN is a good way to learn the process of creating, releasing and maintaining a CPAN module. If you fancy the challenge, there are plenty of modules out there with outstanding bugs. Or maybe there's a feature you'd like to add to one of the modules you use? In this post I'll outline the process I've used to adopt modules, then describe each step in more detail. Let me know how this can be improved.

It's all too easy to take CPAN for granted, particularly the modules which just work, and continue to do so year in, year out. Take a moment to thank the author of one of your "go to" modules. I did: he seemed to like it, and it made me feel good too. There's a quest stencil for this on Questhub — give it a go.

Semantic versioning defines a scheme for MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH version numbers. There's a SemVer module on CPAN, and some people have started switching to semantic versioning for their modules. I think this is more complicated than at least 99% of dists need.

In this post I'll argue that you should provide a concise, clear and informative abstract for your module: what that means, and why you should do it. Think of your module's abstract as the shop sign that passersby use to decide whether they should come in.

I've done a first sketch review of modules for converting markdown to HTML. I'm currently using Text::Markdown in my blog engine, but would like to add some extensions, so I was wondering if any of the existing markdown modules provided an extension mechanism.

One of my next CPAN reviews is going to be a review of web frameworks for Perl. This post outlines my current plan and the frameworks I'm aware of. I'm also hoping to get some guinea pigs to help out as well.

There are a number of things that jar with me slightly about the common perl coding style. One of them is the apparent desire to write code that reads like a sentence, and one specific part of that is determination to not parenthesise function parameters.

I just released a bugfix for a critical bug in Crypt::RandPasswd. This was the module, and the bug, which started me writing reviews of CPAN modules.

I've decided to do most of my perl blogging here from now on, rather than on blogs.perl.org (BPO). I'll still post announcements of reviews and things like that on BPO, but general everyday perl blogging will go here. In this post I'll discuss the reasons, and briefly cover the tool I'm using.