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Gabor Szabo
Gabor Szabo

Posted on • Originally published at perlweekly.com

Perl Weekly #619 - Maintenance of CPAN modules

Originally published at Perl Weekly 619

Hi there!

There are way too many CPAN modules that are abandoned or at least not maintained. Even many central ones rarely see activity. It is not very surprising though. Many people who used to develop and maintain these modules have moved to some job where the particular module is not needed or even where they use other languages. Actually I see similar things in Python as well, but let's focus on Perl now.

Encountering an issue in such a module that is hardly maintained is a frustrating experience as you could also read in the recent article of Dave Cross. However, it is not only frustrating. It hinders the efforts to get the job done. If it is an individual who wants to write some personal code that's 'just' frustrating. If it is a corporation then this actually cost a lot of money in wasted time.

So what can be done about this?

For individuals such as Dave and plenty of people on this list, I think really the only solution is to take over the maintenance of the modules.

A corporation has various strategies. They can allocate time to their employees to fix the issues in the open source libraries. They can hire someone to work on these open source libraries. They could try to contract the developers and maintainers of these modules. Or they can just disregard the problem and basically make their own employees (that's probably you) frustrated and waste a lot of time overcoming the issues.

After I read this article a few weeks ago I wanted to see if I could offer a similar serveice. An alternative to the solutions mentioned before. In a nutshell: companies could contract me specifically to work on the open source libraries they care about. (primarily Perl and Python libraries). I contacted a few companies and started to work with some of them on the idea.

My original thought was that we'll agree upon a certain list of modules and I'll work on that. Instead of that my first task is a more generic one. To make a tool that can help us evaluate the problems for a particular set of modules and decide what is more urgent. Basically triage the issues across a few 10s or more likely a few 100s of CPAN modules.

So in the last week or so I changed the CPAN Digger a lot. Besides listing the most recently uploaded modules it now has a list of the most heavily dependent on modules based on the river analogy of Neil Bowers. It has a page for every distribution and every author. There is plenty of more to improve on it, but I am glad there are at least a few people who see this type of work valuable.

I am not good at marketing and sales so I figured the only way this model could work if some of you working at corporations who understand the need will become the local champions of the idea. Then we could work together to formulate the service to your management in a way that will be valuable to them. If you think this could help you, talk to me so we can figure this out together.

Enjoy your week!

--
Your editor: Gabor Szabo.

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(C) Copyright Gabor Szabo
The articles are copyright the respective authors.

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