NEILB's Blog

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.

For the first 20 or so years, PAUSE treated indexing permissions case sensitively. So Foobar was considered a different module from foobar. This caused problems on operating systems with case insensitive filesystems like MacOS and Windows. So at previous QA Hackathons and Toolchain Summits, it was decided that PAUSE should treat indexing permissions case insensitively. In 2016, at the Rugby QA Hackathon, I started a project to resolve the historical clashes in indexing permissions.

Some modules on CPAN were created by the same person who has always released it. But there are plenty which have been through many different hands, and which perhaps are released by a number of different project / team members. How should those different people be acknowledged? This post was prompted by IRC discussion with RJBS and GENEHACK, and Rik's blog post where he proposed that MetaCPAN should show the owner of a dist rather than the person who last released it.

PAUSE supports an informal mechanism for flagging that a module is available to be taken over, or to flag that you'd like help. In this article I'll outline the mechanism, and point out some things to be aware of.