In my quest to clean up my CPAN distributions and to normalize them, I've been working on CPAN::Critic, my unreleased tool that looks at my directory and complains about things I don't like. That's going nicely for the most part, but I ran into a small problem that's taken me down a bit of a rabbit hole of C++. All this in the same week I wrote a Python program.

I want to check that the minimum version of Perl the code requires is the same as the /users/brian_d_foy/2015/01/index.html

Most of my READMEs are lame. I have stuff that no one will really ever use. As I'm cleaning up my distros, I starting thinking about what should be in there. To do that, I have to think about the people who would read such a thing.

A long time ago in an internet far, far away, READMEs were small documents that you could inspect before you committed to the full download. After that, we neglected them for a long time. Then GitHub started formatting them, so now they are interesting again.

But who would read them?

Some people turn the embedded module documen…

I've been playing with the Makefile.PL modulino idea this week as part of my CPAN cleaning. It's dangerous to have so much fun because I'll keep working on it. Someone might need to take my GitHub away.

Before I go on, I'm disappointed to report that the green boxes in my GitHub activity are relative to me. I was happy to make dark green boxes each day this month, showing the highest level of commit(ment)s. But then I made a few chan…

I spent another day of prosaic adjustments to my CPAN distributions. For quite awhile the chaos of the Changes and README files have bothered me, so I wanted to think about those. And, many of the files I scheduled for deletion disappeared from PAUSE today.

I'd like Changes to have structured information that a program can turn into a data structure (and query, such as "What version fixed GitHub issue #137?". We don't quite have that, but there is the start of a specification in CPAN::Changes::Spec a…

My second day of CPAN Cleaning was just the sort of work that I like: organizing a chaotic mess into something I can work with. My CPAN distributions are a mix of almost everything I've done in my history as a CPAN author. There was a CVS repository in the mix, several things left over from Sourceforge, and various ways of using Git. Even in the Git repos, many files still had CVS tags. A surprising number of files don't end in a newline, making for apparently pointless file changes.

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)…