NEILB's Blog

If you're emailing the PAUSE admin alias (modules@perl.org), saying that you want to adopt a module / distribution, please Please PLEASE include your PAUSE id in your email.

As part of the CPAN Report post I did recently, I looked at how recently distributions had their last release, and how that varied with the river position (number of dependent distributions). I've been playing with some other ideas related to this, to see if they'll help identify distributions that could do with some TLC.

As I've previously written about, one of the things I do when I adopt a distribution is to get it 'CPANTS clean'. To make my life ever-so-slightly-easier, I've created a Dist::Zilla command that will generate the CPANTS Kwalitee score for your distribution: dzil kwalitee.

Whenever I adopt a module now, one of the first things I do is switch to Dist::Zilla, because it makes my life easier. But now I'm thinking I should only do this when it's a clear adoption, with minimal chance of the previous maintainer getting involved again. There's the perennial problem people have with DZ: to work on a module you have to install Dist::Zilla, and that doesn't always go smoothly.

Today was the 100th consecutive day that I released something to CPAN. Ninety days ago BARBIE had done 11 days, prompted by my CPAN regular releasers page, and announced his intention to do 30 (so he would lead the all-time daily list). I decided to give chase, figuring I could ride in his slipstream, and do one more release than him when he stopped. But the bugger hasn't stopped yet!

Three years ago I adopted Sean Burke's Lingua::EN::Numbers, as a result of reviewing CPAN modules for spelling numbers in English. Last month (May) I adopted two more of Sean's Lingua::EN:: modules, Lingua::EN::Numbers::Ordinate and Lingua::EN::Numbers::Years. Today Sean casually challenged me to add to the collection, which resulted in the first release of Lingua::EN::Fractions.

I first started the adoption list because I thought that we (the Perl community) needed a way to identify CPAN distributions that were in need of some TLC. One of the key factors used to build the list is whether a dist is being used by other CPAN dists. Today I released a new version of Text::Levenshtein, which is used by 4 other dists. I initially imagined I might just fix a couple of the outstanding bugs, but ended up shaving quite a bit more of the yak.

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.

BOOK and I both recently adopted a distribution each from TOMI, URI-Title and URI-Find-Simple respectively. We got talking about adoptions, and BOOK wondered whether you could automatically identify distributions that had been adopted. A while back I briefly thought about that too, so we chatted about an initial approach. Here I describe that approach, and the code created to try it. Just so I'm clear, the blame for what follows can be put on BOOK.

When adopting a module, one of the steps is to email the author / current maintainer and ask if you can adopt his or her module. Here's a template for that email, to help grease the adoption wheels. Thanks to BOOK, whose laziness gumption prompted this.