NEILB's Blog

This is a follow-up to last year's blog post, where I posted some charts to show how new CPAN users and distributions have changed over time. I meant to post this in January, but was repeatedly ambushed by yaks, and eventually decided it was too late. Then Olaf asked if I could show him updated charts with 2022 data, and I figured I might as well publish a belated report.

In the CPAN Report on 2021 I noted that there has been a steady decline in the number of new authors, releasing authors, and releases, year-on-year, for the last 8 years. In the conclusion, I noted one of the things that I thought would help is a "manual on how to become a good CPAN author". I wonder if we can use Hacktoberfest to get this started?

This is a follow-up to last year's blog post, where I posted some charts to show how new CPAN users and distributions have changed over time. I've updated the charts to include data for 2021, and added a new chart to see if it adds anything else to the picture (spoiler: not really). The executive summary is that CPAN creation is continuing to decline.

PAUSE ran out of diskspace this weekend, so we're asking everyone to delete old releases from their author directory. Every release you do to CPAN stays in your author directory until you choose to delete it. Sometimes you might want your old releases to stay available, but most of the time you could happily delete them (they're always available on BackPAN). Below I'll explain how you can do this.

CPAN was launched in 1995, so Perl developers have been sharing their code with each other for more than 25 years. In this post I'll share various charts that show how releases to CPAN have waxed and waned. I previously did a CPAN Report 2013, which as you'll see below, was when many measures were at or near their peak.

If you're using Net::Todoist I'd be interested in hearing from you. If you're using the Todoist todo-list app, and would be interested in using an API for it, then this might be of interest to you too. I've completely rewritten the module, changing the interface, and talking to more recent REST API. Should I release this under a new name, or not worry about back-compat? I'm leaning towards the latter.

My current PAUSE tidy-up project is to resolve inconsistent first-come permissions on indexed distributions. In working on this I've created several scripts, and updated some modules. In this post I'll go through the most recent things I've done.

In the past, if multiple people released the same distribution, and each of them added new modules to the distribution, then you'd end up with different people having ownership of modules making up a single distribution. That's a pain if you want to give co-maint to someone. PAUSE has been fixed now, to ensure consistent permissions, but there are historical inconsistencies. I'll describe the problem, and how we're fixing it.

Every release you do to CPAN stays in your author directory until you choose to delete it. Sometimes you might want your old releases to stay available, but most of the time you could happily delete them (they're always available on BackPAN). Space is getting short on the CPAN Master, so please tidy up your author directory. I've written a script to identify the biggest hoarders, and have started emailing the top of the list, asking them to free up some space. You can use the script to see (roughly) how much space you could free up.

If the first release of your CPAN module has version 0.01, then when should you release version 1.00, and what does that signify? For a good while now I've kinda of read 0.x as "I'm still kicking things around", and you go to 1.x when things have settled down. I recently realised that others don't think the same as me (I know, amazing huh?), so I thought I'd see what others (that's you) think.