NEILB's Blog

At the QA Hackathon I was working on something with BOOK, for which we were using my CPAN::ReleaseHistory module. I mentioned I'd been meaning to put better cache control in it. BOOK quickly hacked in a max_age attribute and sent me a pull request. So far that's prompted one new distribution, and I've adopted two other distributions. I still haven't got back to CPAN::ReleaseHistory though.

This is the first part of a series about what happens when you upload a release to CPAN, via PAUSE. I started writing it as a single post, but it became way too long before I was even half way. This post will try to be the executive summary, or Reader's Digest condensed version if you like. Subsequent posts will dive into the details; I'll be filling gaps in my knowledge as I go, and expecting to be corrected on plenty of points as well.

For a while now I've been wanting a dashboard for my CPAN distributions, which would show me information pulled from various sources, and list them in an order related to how much stuff I need to do. I've created a very rough first cut — here are some dashboards: NEILB, BOOK, TOBYINK, KENTNL. Suggestions very welcome, as I'd like to play with this at the QA Hackathon later this week.

I've released Date::WeekNumber, which provides two functions for generating week numbers in the format 2014-W09. This is based on code I wrote while creating the CPAN new dist a month contest. I approached the creation of this module slightly differently from my norm, writing the documentation first.

Like many CPAN authors, I'm hooked on CJM's CPAN once a week contest. Talking to BOOK yesterday, he wondered how hard it would be to create a clone, using CPAN::ReleaseHistory or BackPAN::Index. That sounded like a fun challenge (read: yak shave), so I said I'd timebox it, and try to produce a minimal clone in an hour...

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.