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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 like to do, including sitting on my ass and watching TV.

    Now, that being said, if a module author has gone missing, the PAUSE admins (of which I am one) can re-assign the module to an interested maintainer. Short of that, if you find the author doesn't respond to you and the module hasn't been updated, you don't have much risk in patching your local copy and getting on with life. Although informal, the system has worked out very well.

    Sure, you may be annoyed that something goes unfixed. I'm quite sure you'd be more annoyed with having to do without it completely.

    Have you ever considered the possibility that your social skills might be part of your frustration? I certainly wouldn't respond to you if you wrote to me in this manner.
    • 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 ma
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