NEILB's Blog

There are some distributions on CPAN that were last released 20 years or so ago. Understandably many of them don't follow many of the conventions that we expect today, and some of them fail all their tests, and have for a while. I think we should do something about these dists: either update them to be well-behaved modern distributions, or remove them from CPAN. They'll continue to be available on BackPAN. Here I'll go through a batch of the oldest.

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.

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.

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.

In a previous post I talked about deleting distributions from CPAN, and how there are plenty of dists that CPAN would be better without. In that I said I was going to start looking for candidate dists for removal. The first such dist, containing Win32::FUtils, has now been removed from CPAN (on 19th Jan 2014).

I've just released a new version of HTML::Summary, which I adopted from Ave Wrigley (AWRIGLEY) and Tony Rose (TGROSE). The main reason I did this was to resolve a mix-up in PAUSE permissions, that was spotted by Brian Cassidy (BRICAS). But I was also coming full circle: I previously worked with Ave and Tony, and wrote the first version of HTML::Summary (with Tony), which never made it to CPAN.

I think there are times when a distribution should be removed from CPAN entirely. If a distribution doesn't appear to be used, and there are other dists providing the same functionality which are being used, then I think we can consider removing it from CPAN. In this post I'll describe why it's good for CPAN if appropriate distributions are removed, how to decide what distributions should be removed, and suggest a process for distribution removal.

I just released a bugfix for a critical bug in Crypt::RandPasswd. This was the module, and the bug, which started me writing reviews of CPAN modules.