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The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

blogs.perl.org

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Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#21

Post by rol »

melling wrote: post #12
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 t…

Although having a central repository of code on the web is no longer unique to Perl, there is still some of CPAN's infrastructure that would be nice to have in other communities. For instance, cpantesters[1].

As far as I know, only the Lisp community has something similar to cpantesters in their cl-test-grid project.

On the other hand nowadays a language community could probably set up something similar to cpantesters using travis so hopefully we'll see more of those sort of systems in the future.

--

[1] - If you want to play buzzword bingo you can think about cpantesters as a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-organizing, volunteered run, cross-platform continuous integration platform that is free to end-users.

Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#22

Post by username223 »

emeraldd wrote: post #19
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.

I'm not. Especially on larger projects, new contributors usually face something between indifference and hostility. After spending weeks in mailing list battles trying to contribute to a few projects, many people conclude it's not worth their time.

Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#23

Post by meesterdude »

username223 wrote: post #22
emeraldd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not. Especially on larger projects, new contributors usually face something between indifference and hostility. After spending weeks in mailing list battles trying to contribute to a few projects, many people conclude it's not worth their time.

This. Even mildly popular library maintainers will be indifferent or hostile for even the most agreeable PR. Sometimes its just easier to fork and run your own version for this reason, but it makes contributing back to the community difficult.

Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#24

Post by thebouv »

melling wrote: post #12
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 t…

New languages are cool. As long as you're not reinventing the wheel.

Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#25

Post by esaym »

melling wrote: post #12
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 t…

I personally have not found one module in python or ruby that makes me say "I wish I had this in CPAN" (at least for the things I use Perl for). I've tried pretty hard sometimes too...

Re: The CPAN Pull Request Challenge

#28

Post by gjtorikian »

kaens wrote: post #11

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!

Yeah, that's about the same for me. Perl was the first real language I picked up outside of school, with many hours spent inside cgi-bin.
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