I've mostly ignored all this but I will step in briefly. I am the author of a few modules on CPAN. None of them are major. The dependency of one on another module which has been broken for years means that I get frequent e-mail that it fails its tests. There's nothing wrong with -my- module and if you actually force install it, you can use it.
Other stuff of mine is in the alpha, proof-of-concept stage as a set. The code works in the sense that it doesn't die or anything -- the underlying algorithm produces false positives and I've never gotten the time to work on it (the HTTP::ADS was my PhD thesis proposal but I failed to get funding, left the PhD program and took a real job). Pieces of it -do- work (the proxy detector). I'm content to leave it out there as a 'publication' and if someone else wants to use pieces of it go right ahead as long as I am credited with authorship on my parts. I most vehemently resent anyone deciding that my contributions are not worth keeping around. What if one day the CGI::Untaint::Test module gets fixed and my various contributions to CGI::Untaint pass their tests again? For that matter, what if I find time to work on the HTTP::ADS again? I have various sysadmin tools for DNS which I haven't finished the documentation for but hope to get a chance to finish and contribute -- but if my earlier efforts are deemed worthless, there is no way I would contribute anything to CPAN ever again. Maybe you think that's an insignificant loss -- but where is the harm to the community to leaving my contributions where they are? Even if they aren't bug-free, I have tried very hard to make them exemplary in coding and documentation (whether I succeeded or not is for others to judge) so that they at least fill the purpose of examples. I'm not Damian, but my job isn't to write free software or books on Perl.
