Alberto Simões

As last year I was unable to post every month about the Pull Request Challenge assignments, I decided that this year I would try to post updates every three months.

So, for the first month, I got WebInject. The PR was not huge. Just a contribution to add a README file to the distribution. As the author did not want to update the README and the POD, the PR was changed in order to generate the README from the POD. This PR was then merged. Yay, first month complete.

For February, I got IRI. I got confused about what IRI was, but then the problem was finding something where to help. The first contribution was a cpanfile, as that distribution uses Module::Install, and there wasn't a list of the Module::Install modules needed for the developers to install and be able to test the module. It was merged after some minor fixes. Then, tests were fixed in order to skip some properties defined by MOO, that were causing POD Coverage errors (fortunately, they were only run by authors, so no big impact for the end user).

March was the complicated one. Not just the month my Dad got to the Hospital with a heart attack, but also the month he was interned, ending with his dead. In the Perl world, the pull requests didn't work as well as I expected. First I got Net::SSH2. I noticed the version on CPAN used Module::Install and I decided to contribute a cpanfile, just like I did for IRI. But then, authors informed me the latest devel version, was on a different branch, that used Module::Install. I tried to test this version, but it required Alien::Libssh2. And this one, didn't pass the defined tests, neither it was available on CPAN. Given the lack of time and patience (see the second sentence on this paragraph), I decided to request a new module to Neil. I got WWW::Shorten and tried to add a new shortening service. I added it and sent a Pull Request. The result was not only that I was looking to the wrong repository (it wasn't update yet in MetaCpan) but also that authors decided not to include any more shortening service directly on the module, suggesting contributions to be bundled in independent modules. At this time I was so annoyed with this month assignments, that my final pull request was just a sentence in the POD, stating that new shortening services should be released in individual modules. This pull request was merged, and so, decided the month was done. But I also bundled the new shortening service as a new module in CPAN: WWW-Shorten-SapoPuny.