NEILB's Blog

A bit later than usual, this is a quick look at the number of CPAN pull requests that were done in May 2015. A noticeable drop from previous months, but still more than in any month before 2015. Just.

This is the usual quick look at the number of CPAN pull requests that were done in April 2015. Ever-so slightly more than in March (650 vs 643), so the second-best month ever.

This is a collection of suggestions for how to increase the likelihood of a random pull request (PR) being merged. This particularly applies to the CPAN Pull Request Challenge, where you're trying to come up with a PR on a randomly assigned CPAN distribution. These ideas come from feedback I've had from people on the receiving end of random PRs, and discussions with experienced CPAN authors.

This is a quick look at the number of CPAN pull requests that were done in March. Ever-so slightly more than in February, but there were 3 more days.

This is a quick look at the number of CPAN pull requests that were done in February. Not as many as January, but our second-highest month ever. And comparing against previous Februarys, looking pretty good.

I get quite a few emails each week from participants in the pull request challenge 'complaining' that their assigned dist doesn't have bugs to fix. If you've got a dist with outstanding bugs, and it's not on github, adding it to github can increase the likelihood of at least some of those bugs getting fixed. Here I list the top 20 dists not on github, according to bug count.

There are various questions that people have asked related to the pull request challenge: will we be able to see an effect in github's stats, TIOBE, etc? My first question was: will this make a visible impact on the number of CPAN pull requests per month. In short: yes.

I received my first pull request (PR) originating from the PR challenge today. NGLENN had been assigned HTML::ParseBrowser, a module I adopted a couple of years ago. He did the thing I've most been meaning to do, but never got around to. Unprompted. Aces!

Until recently I've always done pull requests in the master branch, but after talking to various people I've learned that this isn't best practice. So I thought I'd share what I've learned so far. Feel free to learn me some more.

You've been handed a random CPAN distribution and been told to do something with it. But what? In this brief post I'll outline a high-level way to consider your options, and what to do for each option, with pointers to online resources to help you.