PrePan

I recently decided to try to create a CPAN module I thought might be of interest to the community.

http://prepan.org/module/nYhnPU5b9ce

Having gone through the steps necessary to create an account and having read the admonition to seek input before adding needless modules to CPAN by posting on PrePan I was a bit disappointed to find that PrePan is not very active.

Is PrePan still a viable channel for vetting ideas or is there a different path? If so, the CPAN instructions might want to suggest the alternatives for bouncing ideas off the Perl community and embracing new folks to contribute to CPAN.

As an aside, I also volunteered too adopt a module by sending the requisite email to the author but never heard back. It's these kinds of experiences that tend to make me wonder why I don't heed the advice of everyone around me and switch to Python where the community is much more vibrant and less disorganized in general.

Having said that, I respect all of the people in the Perl world that have given so much of their time and energy to creating a useful ecosystem for application development. To those who are active in the Perl community and volunteer their time to create working tools without any pay or recognition I commend you.

2 Comments

Another avenue you might try is IRC. #perl on Freenode or #perl-help on irc.perl.org are active and can help with any number of queries regarding the applicability, naming, or design of your modules, and #toolchain on irc.perl.org can help with queries regarding authoring modules for CPAN. Prepan can still be helpful to link to your current efforts, though a github repository works just as well.

If you haven't heard back about adopting the module, the next step is to CC the PAUSE admins: https://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html#How_adopt_module

Giving feedback on PrePAN is difficult: Feedback on building good CPAN-style distributions is automated in CPANTS (https://cpants.cpanauthors.org/) and PAUSE itself will not index dists it can't understand. The value PrePAN adds is in design feedback and solutioneering. This kind of feedback requires people have domain knowledge or to have used other solutions.

I still watch PrePAN, but I find I don't have the domain knowledge necessary to comment on most of the modules published there: I don't use AWS, so I can't know if a new modules solves a problem better. Often, I find that feedback comes when I've already released my code and written a bunch of announcement blog posts and getting started tutorials.

So, I'd say don't sweat it. It's useful to you, and you're offering it in the hope that it might be useful to another, as all open source software hopes to be.

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About bigfoot

user-pic I blog about Perl and Bedrock.