Fix a bug on CPAN Day

If you're still looking for something to do on CPAN Day (Sat 16th August), you could fix a bug in a CPAN distribution. It might be a bug in one of your own distributions, but it doesn't have to be — you could fix a bug in someone else's distribution. If their dist is on github you could send them a pull request, otherwise attach a patch to the issue in RT.

There are plenty of bugs to choose from, so there's not really any excuse!

The following plot shows the number of open bugs in rt.cpan.org each day, since Jan 1st 2012.

So the number of outstanding bugs in RT is steadily increasing. But wait, you say, the number of distributions on CPAN is also increasing.

So here's a plot showing the number of distributions, number of open bugs, and the ratio of open bugs per dist. The number of dists is the total number of distributions ever released to CPAN, not the number of dists currently on CPAN. Even if the dist is deleted from CPAN, it exists on BackPAN, and the bugs are still in RT.

The ratio is nearly stable: it's slowly going up. Very slowly.

In the bug count line, it's a steady increase, with occasional visible blips, mainly upwards. It would be great if after CPAN Day we could see a visible blip down!

Here are the top 20 distributions in terms of the number of open tickets in RT:

CPAN198
Perl-Critic186
libwww-perl164
Module-Build104
Tk103
YAML100
SQL-Translator85
Archive-Zip79
GD79
DBD-mysql78
App-perlbrew77
Math-Pari74
svk69
Module-Install68
PPI68
Storable68
Imager66
Template-Toolkit66
ExtUtils-MakeMaker65
XML-Parser65

Click on a dist name to see the documentation on MetaCPAN, and click on the bug count to see the RT queue.

Thanks to TSIBLEY (trs) for help with RT questions while writing this.

4 Comments

Breaking this down by severity would be more informative. For example, Module::Build has mostly "wishlist" and "unimportant" severity items. Even just excluding "wishlist" tickets would be a more useful "count".

Are there still people using SVK? Seems to me we could move that to BackPAN (69 bug closed!).

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About Neil Bowers

user-pic Perl hacker since 1992.