NEILB's Blog

Prior to the QAH I kicked off a discussion about the name of the event on the cpan-workers mailing list. At the QAH itself some of us got together to talk about it some more. Here I'll summarise both of those discussions.

Andreas König and I have been working to remove the modulelist permissions from the PAUSE database. At the QA Hackathon we worked through the remaining cases, where relevant reviewing them with RJBS, and most of them were removed on the last day of the QAH. Following the QAH we've resolved the last handful, so there are no longer any 'm' permissions in 06perms.txt. This means that the relevant parts of PAUSE can be removed, and a number of modules can be simplified.

Some modules on CPAN were created by the same person who has always released it. But there are plenty which have been through many different hands, and which perhaps are released by a number of different project / team members. How should those different people be acknowledged? This post was prompted by IRC discussion with RJBS and GENEHACK, and Rik's blog post where he proposed that MetaCPAN should show the owner of a dist rather than the person who last released it.

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.

One of my goals for this year is to improve the water quality of the CPAN River, via a range of efforts, aimed at encouraging others to join in (eg the CPAN PRC), since there's only so much one person can do. To help measure this I'm coming up with various metrics. This one is simply looking at how the CPANTS Kwalitee varies across the different stages of the river.

I sometimes ponder on how we can encourage people to become more active in the Perl communities. Following feedback from participants in the Pull Request Challenge, it's clear we could make many of our CPAN distributions more contribution-friendly. A recent blog post and some discussion with Sawyer prompted some specific ideas.

Prompted by some tweets from Su-Shee, I've been thinking about women speakers at Perl conferences, and in particular for keynotes at YAPC::EU this year. These are some thoughts on how we might be able to address this.

In 2015 I ran the first CPAN Pull Request Challenge. Each month participants were assigned a randomly selected CPAN distribution, and had a month to submit a pull request. 496 people signed up, and 237 of them completed 768 assignments between them, submitting pull requests on 677 different CPAN distributions. This is a review of how things panned out, what worked well, not so well, and how things have changed for 2016's challenge.

How would you expect the number of open bugs / issues to vary as you look at distributions at different positions on the CPAN River? I expected the count to increase as you go up river, and it does. There, you don't need to read the rest of this post now :-)

I'm going to run another CPAN Pull Request Challenge in 2016, but with a few differences from the 2015 challenge. Here I'll outline the challenge and the differences.