On Wed, Aug 02, 2000 at 07:47:09PM +0200, Andreas J. Koenig wrote: > > The AUTHOR field is not related to the signature. Actually I would always > > consider LArry as the author of perl, so I would expectLarry to appear > > as the AUTHOR in the OSD, unless he said he wanted someother email address in >there. > > Good point. There are many such cases on CPAN. PDL for example has > often changing release manager. Archive::Tar has gone through several > hands, When we realized that for the first time, we started to use the > words "maintainer" and "contact" instead of "author". Only the > directory "authors" remained with that name. > > For the purpose of making CPAN more maintainable, I see no need to > have an AUTHOR field in the OSD. Maybe AUTHOR is just the wrong name. Maybe it should be something like CONTACT, but there should be an entry for a name+email just like there is an entry for a homepage url. I am thinking more along the lines of when the distribution is taken out of the context of CPAN. Also one thing that may (or may not) be worth considering is using the OSD as a record of what has been installed on a system. The sys admin then has a database installed of what modules they have installed what versions, thier homepages, contact info etc... Graham.
