Andy Armstrong writes: > For that reason attempting to do any completely automated garbage > collection on CPAN would be fraught - but it might be possible to > automatically identify modules that /might/ be dormant and then > manually sift through them.
Trying to change Cpan is likely to be hard: think of who's approval you'd need (technically and socially) and how wide-ranging the effect would be. You're basically proposing a subset of Cpan. Or possibly a subset of Cpan Search. Or maybe a heuristic for putting 'this module seems to be abandonware' notes on AnnoCpan. You can do any of those without the agreement or blessing of anybody else. If your hunch turns out to be correct then your service (or whatever) will turn out to be more useful than the existing one. People will start using it. At that point in can be blessed with more 'official' status. For example, consider JJ's Perldoc project: it's something that he did, and is now running 'officially' as perldoc.perl.org. > I guess there are essentially three categories of module > > 1 active, maintained > 2 actively used, abandoned > 3 not used, not maintained > > It'd be nice to be able to weed out some of the modules in category 3 > and identify cat 2 modules with a view to flagging them as abandoned > so that when/if a new maintainer came along the takeover processes > could be fast tracked. Because in your experience of the past week or so the current process is too slow? I'm not entirely sure what problem you're trying to solve here. But that's largely irrelevant -- because however good your idea is, there's bound to be somebody in the Perl community questioning it or objecting to it! So don't wait for approval: just do it, whatever "it" is, then show folks. Good luck! Smylers
