NEILB's Blog

When cleaning up a river, you need a measure for cleanliness, and then you start cleaning, and see whether your measure shows improvement. This post outlines two simple measures that may help us measure overall CPAN quality, and then start working to improve it. These are just early ideas — I'm sure we can some up with something better.

For the CPAN River model to be useful, we need to be able to visualise it, and show people where their dists sit on the river. This post shows some quick hacks done on the sofa this evening. Definitely needs more thought! This is based off data generated by David Golden, which lists all dists and the total number of downstream dependencies each dist has.

This is a write-up of some ideas that Tux and I bounced round following the CPAN River discussions at the QAH. When doing dev releases of dists that are "up the river", look for changes in the CPAN Testers results of downstream dists to see if you've had a knock-on effect. This could be automated in a 'river smoke tester'.

This blog post describes a model that we found useful for talking about CPAN dependencies and reverse dependencies at the QA Hackathon. At the head of the river is Perl itself with the core modules. The river flows into the sea, which contains all distributions that aren't used by any other distribution. Other distributions sit somewhere along the river, their position determined by their reverse dependencies. This post introduces the core concepts, but nothing more.