Moritz Lenz writes:

> On 10/13/2015 10:52 AM, Richard Hainsworth wrote:
> 
> > Following on the :D not :D thread, something odd stuck out.
> > 
> > On 10/13/2015 03:17 PM, Moritz Lenz wrote:
> > >
> > > We have 390+ modules, and hand-waving away all trouble of
> > > maintaining them seems a bit lofty.
> > 
> > Surely, the idea of keeping the release number below 1.0 is to warn
> > early adopter developers that code is subject to change and thus in
> > need of maintenance?
> 
> ... a large percentage of the module updates are done by group of
> maybe five to a dozen volunteers. ... 5 people updating 70% of 390
> modules. Modules they are usually not all that familiar with, and
> usually don't have direct access. So they need to go through the pull
> request dance, waiting for reaction from the maintainer. In short, it
> sucks.

Thanks for the explanation, Moritz. That does make sense.

I'm still a _little_ uneasy because that sounds a bit like the
explanation of why Makefiles have to use tab characters:

  I just did something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked,
  it stayed. And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about
  a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my
  embedded base. The rest, sadly, is history.
  
    — Stuart Feldman http://stackoverflow.com/a/1765566/1366011

Though the important difference is that invisible whitespace characters
that some editors don't even let you type are particularly
beginner-hostile, whereas allowing undef arguments where they don't make
sense (and hence where callers don't generally try supplying undef) is
something that many Perl 5 programs have been doing for years with no
widespread harm.

Cheers

Smylers
-- 
http://twitter.com/Smylers2

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