It's Earth Day - time to clean up CPAN!

Happy Earth Day 2016!

Fortuitiously, Earth Day this year falls during the QA Hackathon in Rugby, UK. Earth Day is a great time to clean up old distributions in one's CPAN directory, to save storage space on the countless CPAN mirrors and generally reduce clutter. To do this, I run my cleanup script, available here.

It's CPAN Day 2016-0.5!

It's halfway to CPAN Day 2016, so I'm going to be celebrating it as a mini-CPAN Day and using it as an opportunity to get some small releases out that otherwise might not justify a release on their own, like updating the distribution tooling or making documentation tweaks.

Come join me in celebrating CPAN Day 2016-0.5!

Add a LICENSE file to your distribution - it's easy!

Every distribution should have a LICENSE file, that corresponds to the licensing information contained in your Makefile.PL.

You can create this file from the command line by installing App::Software::License - e.g. cpanm App::Software::License. Then, just invoke the software-license command.

Perl QA Hackathon 2014 report

Last week, I travelled to Lyon, France for my first QA Hackathon. Although it is even longer than a YAPC (four full days rather than three), there were no formal talks, no job fair... just thirty Perl programmers put together in a few rooms to work on problems together and improve the Perl ecosystem. I felt very privileged to have been invited, and came ready with a list of projects, problems, and topics of conversation.

Is the module list useful?

Is the PAUSE module list (www.cpan.org/modules/00modlist.long.html) useful anymore? Do any cpan clients, or other tools, make use of it?

I've seen many users (via http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.modules) isubmit their module for registration immediately after upload, so there seems to be an impression that it is a necessary step, despite the PAUSE documentation saying it's not (however it is quite vague as to *how* useful this measure actually is).

This list doesn't even seem to be up to date - e.g. I don't see my module Test::LWP::UserAgent in the list, despite registeri…