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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 patch. For harder bugs, a response opening the bug is just fine. In fact, the rant was caused by me making sure to get all the bugs encountered entered. Many of them had already been fixed in the later version. Most of the others got fixed or at least looked at. But a few are still sitting untouched after a while.

      I also wonder if there are things in the system which can be improved. CPAN has the model of a single person responsible for a module. Only the maintainer can respond to bugs and produce new releases. Would it help having people who can triage bugs? Or people could open up access to version control? We could mark how responsive maintainers are in search.cpan.org. It shows the number of bugs but that doesn't show how long those have been sitting there.

      • 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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