* chromatic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-06-25 19:25]: > Removing the game score completely would fix a lot of what I > consider wrong with CPANTS.
I think the game is actually an excellent idea. The problem is with the metrics. Here are some metrics that are inarguably good: • has_buildtool • extracts_nicely • metayml_conforms_to_known_spec • no_pod_errors • has_tests_in_t_dir • is_prereq Here are some that have proven harmful: • has_test_pod • has_test_pod_coverage What’s the difference? It’s whether the things that are measured are used as a proxy for some other ostensibly desirable property. Kwalitee is helpful when it measures good form directly and unhelpful when it measures an arbitrarily chosen indicator of one of many ways to adhere to good form. (Good style, in contrast, cannot be measure. Kwalitee is not quality.) The game merely amplifies this: helpful metrics become actively helpful and unhelpful metrics become actively unhelpful. I am in favour of keeping the good effects of the game and removing the bad ones. That means cleaning up the metrics roster – for the game. Some not universally applicable metrics may still be of interest, after all. They can stay – as long as they are removed from the game. And by this I mean removing them entirely, that is, they should not figure into the score at all, not even as uncounted bonus points or such, nor even shown on any page that ranks authors. Take Paul Fenwick’s recent proposal in this light: he wants to know whether a module accidentally untaints values or not, but what he proposed is to measure whether a module does `use re 'taint';` – nevermind that this is inapplicable to a large class of modules OT1H and doesn’t even cover all the ground OTO. (Iterating a hash’s keys returns strings that are never tained.) Thus it might be useful to see a page listing the distributions whose modules do `use re 'taint';`, but it’s less than helpful to rank module authors by how many of their modules do so. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
