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dankogai (3580)
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CPAN Name Squatting
CPAN Authors and Perl Porters,
I recently came across two cases of namespace squatting.
Case: Attribute::Memoize
That was taken by MARCEL but the module is missing. I guess MARCEL deleted Attribute::Memoize in favor of Attribute::Util which has the same functionality. But I don't like the idea of grab-bagging of multiple Attribute handlers in a single module so I mailed him what he wants to do with it. The mail was sent on April 8th and I got no reponse since then.
Case: Crypt::Camellia
That module does Camellia cipher for Crypt::CBC. The algorithm became open source only recently (April 13th) so it is almost impossible that the name space be registered by someone else. But it is registered by JCDUQUE. It is registered as RcdOg but once again the module itself is missing (naturally). Since JCDUQUE has registered Many Crypt:: modules, he did so assuming it will soon be available.
I now have a very strong doubt of module registration system. Do we really need that? And who and how the registration be processed is in the haze. I have requested to register Encode and Jcode before. Encode is even in core but those requests were simply ignored.
http://search.cpan.org/ seems to be taking more practical approach. Just index whatever does REALLY exist. So Attribute::Memoize and Crypt::Camellia belongs to me from its point of view. But once you fire up CPAN shell, it's registration that has te precedence.
I want some action be taken.
Dan the Foresaken by CPAN
Or is it a BUG?"
"Let's call it an accidental feature. :-)"
--Larry Wall in <6909@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
We can rebuild it! (Score:1)
And that comes about it's been humped at and abused for 10 years.
Lots of namespaces have first-come assigned, and those don't get cleared when they move. The module list provides additional metadata and a layer of officialdom
The modules@perl.org mailing list deals with corner cases and strange situations.
It has at times gone through unresponsive periods, but you shouldn't take that as an indication of it always doing so.
It has been fairly response for the last 9 months at
Let's be fair, please (Score:2)
The gateway to that is the Perl Authors Upload Server (PAUSE). You just need a CPAN ID, which is pretty easy to get. You can then upload any module that you like, including ones with names already taken.
On top of that is the PAUSE indexer, which makes the CPAN meta files. It knows who uploaded what and which CPAN IDs get first right to a mo
Re:Let's be fair, please (Score:1)
I'm not sure if there are any obvious steps we could take to make the situation any better though.
God knows I'd hate to have some web application or something queuing module requests. That would get out of hand pretty quickly. At least when something falls through the cracks on modules@ currently it doesn't hang around to slow things down later.
Is there anything you would suggest Dan?
Re:Let's be fair, please (Score:1)
"Still, just because it isn't reasonable doesn't mean he doesn't have a point..."
Re:Let's be fair, please (Score:2)
Attribute::(Util|Memoize) namespaces (Score:1)
Marcel