On Saturday 07 August 2010 15:56:28 Ovid wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----
>
> > From: Shlomi Fish <[email protected]>
> >
> > On Saturday 07 August 2010 00:44:05 Ovid wrote:
> > > Laughing at that "active_dev" tag.
> >
> > What's wrong with it?
>
> First, my apologies for being so flippant. That was rude of me and I'm
> sorry. I just typed what popped into my head without thinking about how it
> sounded.
>
> Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that these tags become popular.
> Over time, the majority of CPAN modules are not actively developed because
> the authors move on to other languages, other careers, or just forget
> about the darned module. They're going to leave the "active_dev" tag
> there because they forgot about it, not because it's true.
>
> I can't tell you how many times I've supplied a complete patch, with tests
> and documentation, for a known bug in a module and had absolutely no
> response from the author. If I am willing to do all of that work for them
> and they ignore it, why on earth would they bother with a new release just
> to fix a tag which doesn't alter the module's functionality? They won't.
> They're not going to care. Thus, I confidently predict that the CPAN
> would become littered with tons of "active_dev" tags which are flat out
> lies and thus undermine our confidence in tags in the first place.
There's an easy solution to this problem - have this tag retire after there
hasn't been a new release in, say, 6 months. Or maybe we can call it something
else. (By retire I mean that search engines, indexers, raters, etc. will
ignore it, not that it will be physically removed from the META.yml).
>
> On a related note, I've not made a new release of Sub::Override in 5 years
> because it's complete and apparently correct. Is it actively developed or
> not?
Maybe I wasn't clear enough in the SPEC, but it wouldn't be "def/active_dev"
because it's not constantly enhanced. What I meant by "active_dev" is that the
module is constantly enhanced / expanded / etc.
>
> > > I can't say I've really been paying attention here, but while some
> > > tags (requires C compiler) seem like they might be reasonable, other
> > > tags such as "black_magic" seem highly subjective. And the
> > > "source_filter" tag seems
> > >
> > > to belong in the "black_magic" category.
> >
> > Well, tags may be overlapping. But not all "black_magic" modules are
> > source filters (e.g: Error.pm which is not a source filter, but is
> > black magic.).
>
> That misses the point. Who defines black_magic? What I see as normal code
> (e.g., reaching into a typeglob) is seen as black magic to others.
>
Well, maybe we need a better tag for that.
> I'm not saying this module is a bad idea, but ambiguous/subjective tags
> don't seem useful to me. "adopt_me" doesn't seem problematic. However,
> maybe I'll use this module and create a "works_on_my_machine" tag :)
So far it's not a module - it's just a specification. The code to read the
definitive keywords from the META.yml and handle them is not hard to write,
but we have to agree on a set of initial definitive tags.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
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Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/
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