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Re: The quantity vs. quality lesson

by Abigail-II (Bishop)
on Jun 01, 2004 at 09:48 UTC ( [id://357978]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to The quantity vs. quality lesson

There exist hundreds of ideas - some also crap but others perfect - how to improve quality of CPAN.
By submitting high quality modules, increasing the overall quality of CPAN.
I wouldn't object to the theory, that the Perl community *fears*, that a rigorous evaluation and control of the CPAN modules would bring the poor condition of the CPAN repository to light.
Have all the theories you want, but CPAN isn't "owned" by "the Perl community". CPAN is a project of a few (Jarkko, Andreas, Elaine, ...). Anyone is free to contribute. Anyone is free to not contribute. Anyone is free to start another project, with a different policy. But CPAN's policy has always been that anything is welcome, as long as it's freely distributable (and Perl related). And the CPAN people have stated in the past that this will be the policy for the foreseeable future. Any sort of "control" over modules on CPAN will make that CPAN no longer is CPAN. CPAN is a huge success, and in my opinion one of the major reasons, if not the most important reason of the success of Perl. Even if you could, would you be willing to risk that?
There exist hundreds of ideas - some also crap but others perfect - how to improve quality of CPAN. This is technical detail IMHO. What matters most, is to get the Perl community to accept such a project/shift. As for now, it seems like a holy cow where even providing download statistics or some kind of voting system is perceived as a hypothetic discrimination...

IMHO there is a golden way between the present laissez faire and "running the gauntlet" for module authors. My dream is, that we - the community - find and adopt it.

I really hate this kinds of posts. It's of the form "I don't like X. We should do something about it." But if offers zero suggestions of what should be done. And while it mentions "hundreds of ideas" from the past to change it, it discusses none. You probably rake in a fair amount of XP because of its emotional value, specially if some sucker frontpages it. You get a '--' from me though, because it's just whining, and calling others to solve your (perceived) problems.

Abigail

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Re: Re: The quantity vs. quality lesson
by PetaMem (Priest) on Jun 01, 2004 at 09:56 UTC
    I take your argument, that CPAN is a project of a few, and has its policy. Probably I will start a CPAN2 at some point, probably it will be an "internal set of modules" that will not go to CPAN. Whatever will seem to be more apropriate.

    I wasn't discussing the "hundreds of ideas" in the first post, because I know of the lethargy of the communities (and that's not specific to the Perl community) when it comes to these things. So why waste time?

    The point is NOT "I don't like X, We should do something about it." But it is:

    "I have evidence, that X is far below where it could be, but I'm alone am not able to change it. If there are people out there who think similar, lets do something about it."

    Well - at least I think I'm not able to do it alone. We'll see.

    Bye
     PetaMem
        All Perl:   MT, NLP, NLU

      I don't think a CPAN2 is a good idea. It would be easier to make the current CPAN a better place. And thats quite easy by just writing another Gate to CPAN. So in your case, you could write a kind of search cpan e.g. for linguists which just returns trusted modules who passed your reviews. Thats all needed for a better CPAN, including only the part of CPAN you or your contributers are able to judge. Gateways for specialists like Linguists, Biologists or whatever seem to be a good way, to make CPAN a better place. That probably will not change the attitude of some writers, who advanced to lesson 2 of there beginners textbook of some foreign language, to immediately write crap modules, but at least we could find out, which modules we can trust or not.

      If you want to start such a project, I may volunteer to participate, if it does not become an aggressive page. This means, fair reviews even if this means "crap module" are fine to me, after the author had a change to correct his mistakes. Writing "crap module" without contacting the author in advance, is not the kind of style I could cope with.

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