On Monday 26 June 2006 08:54, Sam Vilain wrote: > Shlomi Fish wrote: > > Now, Adam Kennedy recently made an interesting step of making commit > > access to a Subversion repository with the source code for most of his > > modules to anyone with a valid PAUSE login: > > > > http://use.perl.org/~Alias/journal/29327 > > > > My suggestion is for you to do something similar. What do you think? Is > > there any reason for you not to do so? > > Shlomi, > > Another option is to just upload the distribution with your changes > using your own PAUSE ID to cpan. It will not get indexed, but succeeds > in that users who don't know about or trust some external repository can > still access your changes via the CPAN network.
I really don't want to do that, because it's not a real solution. This mailing list, modules@perl.org and other forums are inundated with such requests for gaining maintainership of authors who disappeared. Now Damian did not disappear - he's still alive and kicking - he just doesn't have the time to apply all patches or fix all bugs. Once a FOSS project becomes popular and the author becomes busy, then having only one person able to commit changes to such a project, scales less and less. That's what version control and multiple commiters (or alternatively or complementarily distributed version control) is for. I could release a module I have changed for with patch A, and then patch B, and then patch C, etc. I've already done it with http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/bits-and-bobs/gringotts-patch/ which is written in C. However, I'd rather take advantage of Audrey Tang's and Adam Kennedy's lead and simply commit changes directly to their version control system so they'll eventually be available upstream. > > If you are in Europe in August, you might like to come to YAPC and see > the announcement of cpan6, this concern is included in the design > requirements and making small changes to other's code will be natural > and safe. > > http://www.birmingham2006.com/cgi-bin/yapc.pl?act=talk-item&talkid=51 > > Sam. Well cpan6 aside, I've thought about an idea for Park ( http://www.shlomifish.org/park-lisp-fooware/park-lisp-informal-spec/ ) which I have yet to put in writing in the slowly-progressing informal spec, but it's doable for other languages too: What happens is that everyone can register a "vendor tag" in CPAN, which is an alphanumeric name. He can also make other people co-maintainers of this vendor tag. Then new versions of modules of an existing author can be released under a vendor tag that they belong to. And the user can specify to install modules that belong to a certain vendor tag. (e.g: "install --vendor=ShlomiFish Parse::RecDescent"). Naturally, it introduces some problems, and probably not a perfect solution but worth thinking of. Note that I hope to see some of the non-Perl6-related improvements to Perl6 back-ported to CPAN (or to CPAN 2.0 - ;-)). Another improvement I thought is a list of secondary sources, each one with its own list of mirrors. This will allow: 1. For projects to set up secondary sources of modules, where they have more control of (or alternatively are of a non-free license). 2. For organisations to set up CPAN-like sources of in-house (so-called "proprietary") packages for the entire organisation, to be installable and updatable from a central location. Regards, Shlomi Fish --------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.shlomifish.org/ 95% of the programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the bottom 5%.
