NEILB's Blog

Hacktoberfest is an annual event where if you do four pull requests in the month of October you'll get a free t-shirt. Why not do your pull requests on CPAN distributions, for example to fix a bug, increase coverage of the test suite, or improve the documentation.

At the end of January, GitHub announced topics, which are basically a way to tag your repositories with keywords. You can constrain a search to repos that have specific keywords.

One third of CPAN distributions (33.1%) have a github repository, but which distributions are they, and are distributions more likely to have a repo if they're further up the CPAN River? This is a quick post to record the stats for future comparison.

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.

There are quite a few CPAN dists on github that don't have the repo listed in the metadata. This post shows how to fix that for a dist that uses Module::Install. I hit various problems, so I'm writing down these notes for next time, and so that people can correct anything I got wrong.

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.

I've been asked a few times why the PR challenge only supports github, and not other repo sites. There are two main reasons: (1) it's by far the most popular, and (2) I have various scripts which use the GitHub API, and I'm too lazy to look into dealing with the other sites. Here are the stats to back up the first point.

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.