What module? Does it have a website or mailing list or other known support group? Does it have other recent releases/maintenance?

Emailing the author is good, but be prepared that it could possibly be a long (maybe even weeks) time before getting a response. Who knows if the author is around or has any free time or is still able to maintain the module or not..

I'm sure you could get good avice/feedback from here as well if you posted your ideas and/or revisions here (maybe in snippets?), especially if it's a module/topic others have used or could use.

As far as what to write the author, hopefully someone will point to a good set of guidelines if one exists, but I think that working off of the bug list and todo list is good because it's things the author presumably wants done already. Also send the author good diff files as well as your complete file, so make it as easy as possible for him to review what you did and merge it into his codebase.

---

---

• 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.