Great feedback on this poll!
A couple I haven't seen mentioned:
- Track record of backwards compatibility: Does the author have a history of keeping existing things stable from release to release, or are previous pieces of functionality continuously changed for no seemingly apparent reason (and without a reasonable amount of time with notices of deprecation or mods that will definitely break stuff)? (ie. will I have to frequently update my distributions due to frequent changes to the dependency)
- A good Changes file. Clear, concise (point-form, not overly verbose) information from version to version, possibly including references to tickets etc
- A *quality* test suite. I can write a 50,000 test test-suite, but how many of those tests are of decent quality? Can I read through tests for example code snips if necessary? Is the suite well laid out with informative file names?
- Test history... does the distribution have a poor failure rate across several releases?
- Does the code unnecessarily piss all over my namespace(s)?
- Does the code blatantly do ridiculous magic for no apparent reason that could cause me hard-to-identify bugs later on down the road?
There are several more that I can't think of right now. Note that some of the above I'm going a bit overboard on... I don't read through every line of code before deciding to use a module. I do however have a reasonable glance to check for consistency, blatantly obvious weirdness, naming of various items (ie. names like sub_a(), sub_b(), my $var1, $var2 etc are red flags) etc
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|