NEILB's Blog

Email me to sign up for the 2015 CPAN pull request challenge! Each month I'll assign you a CPAN distribution, randomly selected. You'll have a month to submit a pull request.

CPAN is awesome - it's "the killer feature for Perl". And you know who we've got to thank for that? Us! CPAN is a rambling random hodge-podge of code; dozens of duplicates; variable quality of code, documentation, test coverage and run-time performance. And d'you know who's to blame? Us!

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!

At last year's London Perl Workshop I went to an entertaining and interesting talk about fractions by Theo Van Hoesel. After releasing the first version of Lingua::EN::Fractions I got in touch with Theo to talk about fractions.

BARBIE and I have been working on a new BackPAN index, and some related things. At the centre of this are BackPAN::Index::Create and create-backpan-index, the module and associated script that can be used to create a BackPAN index. This is now the index used by CPAN::ReleaseHistory, so it's relying on an open-source BackPAN index.

Two days ago I released Perl::MinimumVersion 1.36 to CPAN; there were two main commits that added checks for 3 changes in Perl. Both of those changes had bugs, and in doing so I broke things for other people, something I really didn't want to do. As a result I had to do a release tonight, to fix one of the bugs and back out the other until I can do it properly. I'm going to talk through how I've been working on Perl::MinimumVersion, the bugs, and what I'm going to change. Hopefully people might point out other ways I can improve how I work.

Perl::MinimumVersion is a handy module that will scan your code and tell what the minimum version of Perl that it thinks your code requires. It doesn't have full coverage of Perl features, particularly for releases since 5.10.0. I've been using it more and more, so asked ADAMK for co-maint so I could work on updating it.

Last year I released PAUSE::Packages, which provides a simple interface for iterating over the latest non-developer release of all dists currently on CPAN. It's based on the PAUSE file 02packages.details.txt, which, by definition, doesn't contain developer releases. But sometimes we (or, I, at least) want to know about all recent releases, including developer releases. This prompted me to create CPAN::Releases::Latest.

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.

Today was my 28th consecutive day releasing to CPAN, and I'm one day behind BARBIE who started all this. Having to release every day has pushed me in a number of ways, and I've certainly done more in the last 4 weeks than I would have otherwise.