I've noticed that quite a few modules have maintainers, who take  over when an 
author goes AWOL. What is the process for for achieving that?

The module Net::SMTP::TLS was last released in 2006 by Alexander Westholm 
<awesth...@verizon.net>.   I attempted to contact Alex at that email but the 
message bounced.

I did find that Alexander has a GitHub account 
(https://github.com/alexwestholm), and I found a vanity email address within 
some published files (a...@alexwestholm.com), but alas, his domain expired and 
has been picked up by squatters.

I have also found Net::SMTP::TLS::ButMaintained, which is almost exactly the 
same, save for the current author Fayland Lam having forked Net::SMTP::TLS and 
applied a number of contributed patches, and pushed out subsequent releases.  
Tonight, I forked his fork, applied a patch that corrects some SMTP behavior, 
and within hours he had merged the patch and published a new release. 

The old Net:SMTP::TLS is badly broken in several ways, so there's no good 
reason someone would prefer it. So I asked Fayland about it, and the thread is 
below. 

Thanks,
Matt

On May 10, 2013, at 8:57 PM, Fayland Lam <fayl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> No response. tried few times. but it was 2 years ago and 1 year ago I think.
> 
> do you know him?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Matt Simerson <m...@tnpi.net> wrote:
>> 
>> Did you attempt to contact Alexander?
>> 
>> What was the result?
>> 
>> Matt
>> 
>> On May 10, 2013, at 8:11 PM, Fayland Lam <fayl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> I tried to ask it in modules@perl twice but not got approved. so I do
>>> not have any other choice.
>>> 
>>> Thanks.
>>> 
>>> On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 11:10 AM, Matt Simerson <m...@tnpi.net> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Rather than having a separate fork, why not just take over maintenance of 
>>>> Net::SMTP::TLS?  There seems to be a lot of CPAN now has maintainers 
>>>> taking over for abandoned modules.
>>>> 
>>>> Matt
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Fayland Lam // http://www.fayland.org/


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