Sorry for beating the dead horse a little more, but here goes... On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Nicholas Clark wrote: > On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 01:27:47AM -0400, Christopher Hicks wrote: > > Maybe the e-mail should do something informative like list how many years, > > months and days it's been since a given module has been updated. Some > > weak souls might be guilted into pushing out bug fixes sooner. > > If there are no bugs, there is no need for bug fixes.
Agreed. > MJD gets very irritated with people asking whether certain of his > modules are abandoned, simply because the most recent version is old. If all module writers wrote like MJD there'd be no need for this disussion or this list. :) > Why are you assuming that all stable code has known but unfixed bugs? I'm not. But I've dealt with a variety of different CPAN modules that were avaiable as updated from the authors site that took ages (as in a few years IIRC) to make it to CPAN. How many months of watching this sort of thing go on is considered acceptable before taking the module and uploading it myself? > If anything, have rt.perl.org send out ping messages about new (but > unresponded to) bugs, or maybe open but serious bugs, because these do > have content That's be nice to include and maybe the message could be sent more often to those with unassigned bugs in their modules. > But *do not* send out an "all's well" message, which will get filtered > with the spam to /dev/null, because crying wolf like this will cause > people to miss subsequent real, serious, messages. Sheesh. It's not crying wolf. It's saying "here's the status of your stuff". When you get a monthly statement from your bank they're not crying wolf. They're keeping you up to date. My accountant is hopefully more on top of things than the bank so the only purpose in the statement is to make sure the bank hasn't screwed up, but I don't accuse them of crying wolf because they want to keep me appraised of things. If people are this morally opposed to receiving an e-mail every few months maybe the implementor of this idea should let folks "bury their head in the sand" and stay happy. And presumably this would come from some fixed address used for solely this purpose, so who's really going to miss e-mail over this? -- </chris> The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. -Robert Maynard Hutchins, educator (1899-1977)
