(CC'd to [EMAIL PROTECTED] as a place where we can continue discussion
about PAUSE indexer. p5p would be better for the "readonly"
namespace.)
>>>>> On Fri, 05 May 2000 18:20:42 +0100, Mark Summerfield
><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> Andreas,
> I recently uploaded some modules to CPAN. One of them, Image::Xpm.pm,
> depends on readonly.pm, and although readonly.pm is in my CPAN
> directory, it looks like it isn't being indexed, as per Paul Schinder's
> bug report below. I don't know why this is but would speculate that it
> might be because the name is all lowercase -- I did this deliberately
> because readonly.pm is a pragma module and therefore ought to be all
> lowercase.
Now I got it. Sorry, this took so long, I had to scan logfiles for an
hour to get to the bottom of this. No, it's not because of being all
lowercase.
On April 23rd you submitted readonly-1.04.tar.gz and
tilefall-1.11.tar.gz. Both contained readonly.pm. You had submitted
readonly-1.00.tar.gz some time before, so PAUSE automatically reserved
indexing of readonly namespace to files from you. Due to timing or
alphabetical order, the PAUSE indexer indexed tilefall-1.11 after
readonly-1.04 and rightly decided to index readonly in the tilefall
dist. On April 29th you deleted tilefall-1.11 and thus the indexed
reference to readonly. That's how readonly disappeared.
Simple solution I: Upload readonly 1.05 and be careful to not include
readonly.pm in other dists of yours. The last dist containing readonly
wins. If it is deleted, the indexer does not fall back to a previous
upload.
Complicated solution: try to not rely on the automatic features of
PAUSE (many of which are pure implementation glitches), try to get
approvement from other people first that it is a good idea to occupy
such a commonplace namespace. It is a big social difference if you
call a module "readonly" or pragmaProposal::readonly or
Tk::ColorChooser::readonly.
Simple solution II: upload it again with a defensive name.
The more common a namespace, the more you need the backing of a
community. That's not because PAUSE has a built in community-approval
scanner, it's although such a scanner is missing.
I'd say for a pragma like readonly, you should seek to get approval
from P5P. And I'd recommend scanning the archives because I recall,
there were other proposals for how a readonly.pm should look like (Hi,
Graham!). I believe, a readonly pragma is a good idea, and if the
experts agree with your implementation, this would be a very good
thing.
I'm sorry that you had to make this experience with several
complications in one go.
--
andreas
