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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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CPAN Black Hole 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • CPAN authors don't have to do anything, and they owe nothing to you. Given the option of nothing on CPAN, and something I can fix myself, I'll take the latter.

    As a module author myself, I try to respond to all problems as quickly as I can. However, it's not part of my job and it's not very high on my life priorities. Although I try to be helpful and timely, I feel absolutely no obligation to respond to bug reports, fix modules, or otherwise do anything that's less important than whatever I decide I would li
    • It was a rant. It was meant to be intemperant. I am professional and polite when reporting bugs. I don't literally hate unresponsive maintainers since that likely includes friends of mine. "Slightly annoyed" doesn't get a response.

      At work, we do patch, subclass, and work around bugs. But nobody else ever sees those fixes. That is why users should have the courtesy to report bugs and ideally fix them. The maintainer should have the courtesy to respond. In the easy case, they check and apply the pa

      • It would be wonderful is all maintainers could respond. I wouldn't think that they read messages from users and think "I'm going to be an asshole today and not respond". Remember that they are people too, have lives, jobs, families, and so on, and simply might not have time to respond. With spam filters, they may have never seen your messag. Withthe volume of mail they get, they might be overwelmed with all sorts of mail. They may not be using their CPAN mail address anymore, for whatever resaon, so your mail might be sitting in an account that they never read. There is absolutely no information you can glean from a non-response, so you shouldn't assign any character defects, malicious intent, or anything else to a lack of a response.

        CPAN does not have a single maintainer model. Many people can simultaneously work on, maintain and release a module. The module author can add co-maintainers at any time through the "Change Permissions [perl.org]" panel of PAUSE. If the author has disappeared, a PAUSE admin can add you (write to modules@perl.org).

        No matter what the CPAN model is, that doesn't imply any structure on what else other people can do, such as triaging bugs, developing full patches with tests, and so on.

        CPAN Search already marks the responsiveness of maintainers by showign the release dates of their work. It's an indirect measure, but as good as you will get.

        As a user, you should do a bit of homework before you start complaining. Ask questions first and rant later. Going off without knowing the situation, and making up conspiracies where there is no information does not win you friends. Again, as I saqid previously, part of your problem is you.
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