Alex Balhatchet

Hopefully you've all heard about the amazingly successful CPAN Pull Request Challenge that was run throughout 2015 by Neil Bowers. If not you can read about it here or here. You may also have heard that 2016 is coming in a couple of days, and that Neil is starting up the 2016 Pull Request Challenge.

What you might not know, especially if you didn't take part in the 2015 challenge, is that Neil ran a survey recently to get feedback from the CPAN distribution authors and the participants about how it went. I was both at various points of the year, so I got both surveys :-)

Based on the survey feedback, this year distribution authors are being contacted ahead of time and being asked to opt-in to have their code be included in Neil's random bag of distributions that he reaches into every month. You can even include some distributions and exclude others, or push a particular distribution you think could use some work or has a great to-do list you wish somebody else would dig into.

On the other hand, if you ignore your email then your distributions won't be included. And if too many authors ignore their emails, then the 2016 Pull Request challenge might fall at the first hurdle. So please check for that email from Neil, and sign up as an author (and a participant if you'd like :-))

One more thing: to be included your distribution has to have a Github repository listed in its META.json file, so that its repository shows up through the MetaCPAN API. You can see how I've done this on one of my distros here:

• Test::Kit
• ... has a nice META.json
• ... which is generated from its dist.ini by Dist::Zilla

Thanks!