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The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

blogs.perl.org

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11–20 of 49 posts

Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#11

Post by kaens »

Count me in! The last time I wrote Perl, the Camel Book was a thing and I thought it was cool to have the least number of digits in your slashdot id as possible.

I find it pretty fun to try to modify code that lives in a world that I'm largely not part of, this is a nice little impetus!

Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#12

Post by melling »

schnevets wrote: post #8

I'm in. People around here are sometimes cynical of Perl, but there's a lot of high quality code on CPAN that definitely shouldn't fall by the wayside.

CPAN was Perl's claim to fame. It's what gave it the "edge" over Python and Ruby a decade ago. I think people have finally realized that edge is rapidly fading. I still occasionally use Perl but I'm trying to make my goto language Python or Go, unless I find a better functional language. After all, in 2015, shouldn't we be using OCaml or F# for our quick jobs?

I guess I'd rather invest in the future rather than try to save the past.

Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#13

Post by twerquie »

belden wrote: post #10
twerquie wrote: post #3

> The goal is to help others, possibly learn something, and hopefully have a bit of fun Seems like it shouldn't be limited to CPAN modules.

What else would you include?

I guess I was just being a bit cynical, he should have stated a goal to revitalize CPAN.

Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#14

Post by perlgeek »

I'm in.

Some years ago I tried to motivate people to contribute to Perl 6, and found that while many had some lingering interest in doing so, they needed some steering.

This was hard for me to do, because usually in Open Source communities, you aren't supposed to tell people what to do; they are free to chose the occupation after all. But I found that it worked very well.

So I think the CPAN Pull Request Challenge is a very good approach to steer people to particular projects, without causing too much work for those who steer. At least it's a very good experiment to try.

Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#15

Post by hueving »

kolom wrote: post #9

Sounds great, is there anything like this for php?

I don't think php has reached the point where a lot of libraries have reached stagnation.

In general though it would be cool to just automate this in some fashion. Occasionally email participants a link to projects that haven't had commits in many months but have open bugs or feature requests.

Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#16

Post by oalders »

hueving wrote: post #15
kolom wrote: post #9

Sounds great, is there anything like this for php?

I don't think php has reached the point where a lot of libraries have reached stagnation. In general though it would be cool to just automate this in some fashion. Occasionally email participants a link to projects that haven't had commits in many months but have open bugs or feature requests.

It's not necessarily _just_ about dealing with stagnation. It's also about finding a way for people to start contributing to open source. If you've never released anything, just patching someone else's work is a great way to start. This automates the selection process so you don't necessarily have to look around for something that needs help.

Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#18

Post by debacle »

kolom wrote: post #9

Sounds great, is there anything like this for php?

Compared to CPAN, PHP is fairly monolithic. Many of the OSS projects that we hear about are sponsored and/or open/closed or the Automattic business model.

Many CPAN modules are blobs of arcanery and some work completely well but are relatively abandoned.

Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#19

Post by emeraldd »

perlgeek wrote: post #14

I'm in. Some years ago I tried to motivate people to contribute to Perl 6, and found that while many had some lingering interest in doing so, they needed some steering. This was hard for me to do, because usually in Open Source communities, you aren't supposed to tell people what to do; they are free to chose the occupation after all. But I found that it worked very well. So I think the CPAN Pull Request Challenge is…

I'm still amazed at the number of developers who have a block around filing bugs or send out pull requests for the tools/libraries they use.
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