In part 2 of this series I looked at the "shop window" for rubygems and cpan, and you could see a massive difference in focus both in terms of what was highlighted on the main page and the kind of documentation provided when you looked further (TL;DR is rubygems is frictionless and encouraging with few warnings or rules mentioned up front, while cpan involves poking around fusty old usenet style FAQs full of warnings, expectations and saying to wait for a week or so…

In part 1 I looked at numbers, now I want to look at uploading and the uploads themselves.

Uploading to rubygems is very simple, I don't know or use ruby, but just from looking at the frontpage I'm pretty confident that it would be pretty quick and easy : 1/2 of the main content of the page is a quickstart guide in 3 simple steps. Neat! (I'm sure there is more to writing a good gem, but that definately leaves you feeling confident to give…

So I noticed that CPAN is no longer king of the hill when it comes to sheer number of packages - rubygems took that title mid 2011 (when exactly depends on whether you include dev version and backpan which it lacks).

Rubygems had previously claimed the title based on dodgy numbers, but by the start of 2012 there really wasn't any doubt - that's a hell of a lot of uploaded code.

At first I was a little downhearted and disappointed, luckily I remembered a ="http…

I adopted PDF::Report a couple of weeks ago after contacting the authors, who were happy to provide me with the privs I needed on pause, since then I've created a github repo but not had a chance to do any of the work I've been planning.

Before I start messing around with PDF::Report too much though, I'm doing housekeeping.

- so first task is to apply the patches in the current rt.cpan.org bug queue and close them (2 down, 1 to go).
- also, now that it's on g…

I heard back from Andy Orr and Aaron Mitti, and they were happy for me to put in some work and a fresh release - already created the github repo and outlined a brief roadmap.

More to follow soon

So I've been messing around with Calendars a bit for fly-half in order to handle events and stuff like that nice nicely... in a typical ADHD Yak Shaving event I ended up writing a new CPAN module for dealing with Calendars : Calendar::Model

You can see a nice Bootstrap calendar page in the examples on github with the end result looking like this image on twitter …

I've just decided to spend a couple of hours tidying up my CPAN projects - surprising how little you can get done in an evening if you let things slip.. on the plus side, I've made a start and cleaned things up a bit :

• Autodia page on my personal site now updated to point to latest version on metacpan, and files to svn trunk
• Several bugs marked resolved, and updated, spam delete in rt.cpan.org
• Emailed Smylers about consolidating the various GraphViz::DBI forks on cpan using some shared co-maint and github (anyone else interested give me a buzz)
• Tidied up Graphviz::SQL and Math::Curve::Hilbert a bit and put them in github.

My Plan is to mark any bugs older than 5 years or for very old version of my cpan modules as stalled or won't fix and then get on top of what's left - all my CPAN modules are being moved into github too.

No code written this evening, but definitely useful time spent.