brian d foy

Read my other entries in "cpan cleaning"

With some encouragement from Neil Bowers, I'm tidying up my CPAN footprint. Over the years I've collected modules I did not write, permissions I never used, and all sorts of other situations that muddied the data when I what to create a list of CPAN objects I want to pay attention to. On the first day of the new year (check out the sweet Julian Date converter), I set out to tidy up.

First, I scheduled old files for deletion from PAUSE, including older versions and modules that I don't want to maintain anymore. Even through it's {Winter|Summer}, it's time for CPAN Spring Cleaning.

Then, I made fresh versions of the modules I want to give up so their Makefiles, docs, and READMEs note that the module is unmaintained. I upload the modules into the ADOPTME user. That gets it out of the listings in CPAN Search or MetaCPAN.

That's not the only thing that's messy. When I View Permissions in PAUSE, I don't recognize some of the modules. I give up those permissions. In many cases, I only had those permissions temporarily so I could pass them on to someone else. This one time, at CPAN, I convinced Sinan to take over Crypt::SSLeay.

Some of my older modules never made it onto GitHub. Before I start managing everything en masse, I want them to be consistent. GitHub repos for everyone!

Finally, I went through my huge directory of git clones and moved out all the ones whose origin didn't belong to me. I've been meaning to do that for a bit since I have this bad habit or cloning, fixing, and pull requesting without removing the clone afterward. Now I have a directory that are clones for just my modules, which means I can automate looking in each directory to list what I need to do.

Now I wait four days for all those files to disappear from PAUSE, the various databases to update, and for Neil to post 10 more things I should be doing with all my distributions.