Adam Kennedy wrote:
Salve J Nilsen wrote:
Just a wild thought...
Would it be useful to check for references to community support
channels like mailing lists, IRC channels, public bug trackers and
official web pages?
One way to do this could be to look for relevant keywords in the
META.yml file or to do simple scanning of a SUPPORT section in the POD...
Is this feasible?
Not really.
At an implementation level, META.yml would need support for that sort of
things.
That doesn't seem too difficult to me (sorry 'bout the pseudo-YAML).
--- #YAML:1.0
support:
irc: irc://irc.freenode.net/perl-qa
bugtracker: http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bugs.html?Dist=Module-Starter
webpage: N/A
webforum: N/A
blog: N/A
list-subscribe: http://lists.cpan.org/showlist.cgi?name=perl-qa
faq: N/A
coderepository:
cvs: N/A
subversion: N/A
mailarchive: http://www.mail-archive.com/perl-qa@perl.org/
annotated_docs: http://annocpan.org/dist/Module-Starter
Is there a (public) authoritative META.yml spec describing required,
recommended and supported fields? If so, what does it take to extend the spec
to include community information?
At a purely social level, not every module needs to have IRC channels
and official web pages.
Sure, not everyone needs one, and certainly not their own. But if there exists
some channel where one could reliably reach the author(s), wouldn't it be "nice
to know"? (Personally, I think it's more than "nice to know" - it's more like a
"requirement for open source projects to prosper".)
The presence of lack thereof is more an indication of the scale and
importance of the module, rather than anything you can judge all 10k
modules by.
I'd rather interpret the presence/lack of community pointers as an indication
of how interested that community is in attracting new users, helping them use
the software, or even help them take part actively in the software development.
Why for $DEITY's sake wouldn't one want to make it as easy as possible for
people to join in on the fun? Standardizing community
If at all possible, I'd like to see any new CPANTS metrics being about
things that are well studied, and that are fairly universally agreed to
be applicable to all 10,000 modules.
I'd also love to see the metrics used as a tool for improving the community
around the software... Having ambitions to improve the general code "quality"
in CPAN is very fine, but since that is mostly a social "game", I think it
would be a good idea to also help the game sustain itself by making it easy for
new participants to join and help improve the code.
- Salve
