Downvoting unsupported modules
A new, late, new year's resolution for 2012: rate unsupported modules with 1 star. Two such examples. By unsupported, I mean tickets are not responded at all (let alone bugs fixed) for months or even years. Perhaps module-starter should emit this POD section template instead:
=head1 BUGS
Please report any bugs or feature requests to
C<bug-foo-bar at rt.cpan.org>, or through the web interface at
L<http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Foo-Bar>.
I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of
progress on your bug as I make changes.
BUT KEEP IN MIND THAT I MIGHT GO ON, HAVE A LIFE, AND FORGET
COMPLETELY ABOUT THIS MODULE, THAT YOU SHOULD RELINQUISH
ANY HOPE OF GETTING TIMELY RESPONSE FOR INQUIRIES ABOUT
THIS MODULE, IF EVER.
No, I'm not bitter, really :)
A programmer (mostly Perl 5 nowadays).
My CPAN ID: SHARYANTO. I'm sedusedan on perlmonks. My twitter is stevenharyanto (but I don't tweet much). Follow me on github: sharyanto.
Often its enough to ask them for comaintainership, alternatively, if they seem to have dropped from the internet and extensive sleuthing hasn't turned up any other accounts to annoy them at, talking to the PAUSE admins will help give those modules some live again.
Yep, I've done that a couple of times myself (and fork a couple others, because I wanted to make more drastic changes). Although realistically you cannot adopt every module out there.
Maybe the module-starter template should instead say:
"If you fix any of the problems you find in this completely free code, please let me know. I started with the parts I needed, and you can add the parts and fixes you need. We can all help each other with the parts we need to eventually end up with something really nice."
:)
Hey, +1 for what Brian suggested. :)
Unfortunately, Steven, no one found your rating on Underscore helpful either (0 out of 5). Damn, that's harsh...
This reminds me I need to give some attention to Module::Starter's RT queue.
Yeah, what's up with that? :)
useful and unsupported modules, once downvoted, have lower chances of being used and adopted by someone new.
Better upvote useful modules and leave the others unharmed.
This seems relevant.
Not quite. It's okay to not release new versions. But perhaps resolve/respond to tickets in the queue?
I buy the lower chance of being used claim, but not the lower chance of being adopted. Why wouldn't someone who finds a module useful be less inclined to adopt it solely because of its rating?
Also, in the case of modules like Locale::Geocode and Locale::Subcountry, a frequent/periodic update is arguably required, to keep up with the data. To take an equivalent example, would you use timezone database that is 10 years old?
I'd downvote Locale::Geocode and Locale::Subcountry not because of the stale data, but because of the very design. It embeds a massive ammount of XML data in the library and then parses the XML when loading. That's horrible design. The data should be stored in a preparsed format not requiring an XML parser. And there should be an option to fetch fresh data and cache it.
I would guess that mostly only users of modules adopt modules. :-)
Argument:
If user does not use module because it has a terrible rating, user won't get chance to find it useful and has lesser chance to adopt it.
And it even uses a half-assed, regexp-based "XML parser." The module is junk, but not because it's "unsupported."