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in reply to Re: Re: The quantity vs. quality lesson
in thread The quantity vs. quality lesson

Difficult to judge wether a module is old and unmainted and therefore should be removed.

Some people just get panic reading something like "last release 1998" , but it could be well written software which does not need any maintance, updates or whatever. The newest ist best! results quite often in usenet messages like "Is (n)vi abandoned?" which I view as a rather funny message. And, shame on me, I regularly use, as a part of my toolbelt, the unix command "diff" and don't even know wether its regularly updated, maintened or whatever.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: The quantity vs. quality lesson
by PetaMem (Priest) on Jun 02, 2004 at 07:50 UTC
    Actually diff could use some shape up as for intra line and binary diff...

    But if a Module - lets say my favourite Parse::RecDescent will have it's last update in 2001 and we'll have the year 2007, then I see no problem:

    • Keeping it if there will be no other module (and we know Damian won't write it) like Parse::FastDescent with same API, but just functionally equivalent/better and faster.
    • Moving it to CPAN-Nimbus else
    And I'm not saying newest is best. I thought I could discuss at the monastery, on some sophisticated level where it is not necessary to say everything explicitedly.

    Bye
     PetaMem         All Perl:   MT, NLP, NLU

[reply]
      Modules should never be removed. Other scripts and applications may depend on them, and I consider backward compatibility to be an important feature.

      Rather write a comment on cpanratings if you think that a module is bad, or add a bug report on rt.cpan.org. Share your knowledge with the community, it is already possible. Right now.

[reply]
        Is it really the case that scripts and applications that depend on old modules will get broken if they are removed from CPAN?

        I know when I use modules on CPAN I make local copies, and don't run them from the 'net. I'm not sure it's feasible to do otherwise.

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