use Perl

• Notable lights out? (Score:2)

  by nicholas (3034) <nwc10+useperl@colon.colondot.net> on 2008.11.10 4:25 (#65808) Homepage Journal

  In the past it has been frustrating for those wishing to fix broken modules, or want to take over maintainership, as it means a lot of effort is wasted trying to track down the author. The PAUSE Admins now have procedures to deal with this, but it would be so much easier to be able to contact author by their PAUSE address in the first place.

  In future for all those addresses that do get bounce backs, I shall be disabling the sending of summary reports.

  Given that CPANTESTERS has the side effect of determining which PAUSE addresses appear now to be invalid, would it be worth feeding that information back into the PAUSE database? In my opinion, having PAUSE, and tools such as search.cpan.org, show that an author is believed to be unreachable would have two benefits:

  • If the author is unaware of it, he/she may find out this way, and be able to rectify the problem
  • Knowing that the author is now believed uncontactable is useful information when you are choosing between modules to use. If it's going to be "hard" to get bug fixing patches into an upstream release, or even offer to take over a module, then it's better to know that up front, and potentially nip the problem in the bud by adopting an alternative module

  Reply to This

  • Re: (Score:2)

    by barbie (2653)

    It's not necessarily that the author is uncontactable, but that the most obvious way to contact them, isn't set up.

    From my list, there were 32 PAUSE@cpan.org addresses that have email forwarding set up, which failed due to the forward address no longer existing. These are worth reporting perhaps, as in at least one case I know the author has moved jobs.

    However, the vast majority of rejections were due to the PAUSE@cpan.org address not having a valid forwarding address setup. In the author's PAUSE account