

The CPAN Pull Request Challenge - eperoumal
http://blogs.perl.org/users/neilb/2014/12/take-the-2015-cpan-pull-request-challenge.html

======
perlgeek
I'm in.

Some years ago I tried to motivate people to contribute to Perl 6, and found
that while many had some lingering interest in doing so, they needed some
steering.

This was hard for me to do, because usually in Open Source communities, you
aren't supposed to tell people what to do; they are free to chose the
occupation after all. But I found that it worked very well.

So I think the CPAN Pull Request Challenge is a very good approach to steer
people to particular projects, without causing too much work for those who
steer. At least it's a very good experiment to try.

~~~
emeraldd
I'm still amazed at the number of developers who have a block around filing
bugs or send out pull requests for the tools/libraries they use.

~~~
username223
I'm not. Especially on larger projects, new contributors usually face
something between indifference and hostility. After spending weeks in mailing
list battles trying to contribute to a few projects, many people conclude it's
not worth their time.

~~~
meesterdude
This. Even mildly popular library maintainers will be indifferent or hostile
for even the most agreeable PR. Sometimes its just easier to fork and run your
own version for this reason, but it makes contributing back to the community
difficult.

------
kaens
Count me in! The last time I wrote Perl, the Camel Book was a _thing_ and I
thought it was cool to have the least number of digits in your slashdot id as
possible.

I find it pretty fun to try to modify code that lives in a world that I'm
largely not part of, this is a nice little impetus!

~~~
gjtorikian
Yeah, that's about the same for me. Perl was the first real language I picked
up outside of school, with many hours spent inside cgi-bin.

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schnevets
I'm in. People around here are sometimes cynical of Perl, but there's a lot of
high quality code on CPAN that definitely shouldn't fall by the wayside.

~~~
melling
CPAN was Perl's claim to fame. It's what gave it the "edge" over Python and
Ruby a decade ago. I think people have finally realized that edge is rapidly
fading. I still occasionally use Perl but I'm trying to make my goto language
Python or Go, unless I find a better functional language. After all, in 2015,
shouldn't we be using OCaml or F# for our quick jobs?

I guess I'd rather invest in the future rather than try to save the past.

~~~
rol
Although having a central repository of code on the web is no longer unique to
Perl, there is still some of CPAN's infrastructure that would be nice to have
in other communities. For instance, cpantesters[1].

As far as I know, only the Lisp community has something similar to cpantesters
in their cl-test-grid project.

On the other hand nowadays a language community could probably set up
something similar to cpantesters using travis so hopefully we'll see more of
those sort of systems in the future.

\--

[1] - If you want to play buzzword bingo you can think about cpantesters as a
distributed, fault-tolerant, self-organizing, volunteered run, cross-platform
continuous integration platform that is free to end-users.

------
ASUmusicMAN
What a fantastic idea. I think this will really speak to those of us that may
need a little nudge before feeling comfortable. I've dusted off my PAUSE ID
and signed up.

Does anyone know of any other langs/communities that have tried something like
this? This seems like a great idea to learn and contribute.

~~~
rurban
Almost every langs have a CPAN alike. They just copied it.

CTAN for TeX, CCAN for C, forgot the ruby name, LISP has it even with a
cpantesters alike testers grid, PHP split it into PECL for binary extensions
(higher quality) and PEAR, which struggles. emacs lisp, node.js, ocaml, ...

go uses git only for their distributed module system, which is a nice and
simple idea, (github as default) but also appeared in common lisp before.

~~~
kbenson
I think the question was less "What other languages have module repositories
like CPAN" and more "Does anyone know of other module ecosystems that are
running projects like this to get people involved?"

------
esaym
Add don't forget to use
[http://www.cpantesters.org/](http://www.cpantesters.org/) so you can see how
your test cases run on a variety of platforms.

------
sivoais
You never know when that pull request could turn into co-maintainer
permissions. ;-) That happened to me with 3 packages last month!

~~~
mst
Well volunteered!

------
fibo
I am in, nice iniciative. I've just released
[https://metacpan.org/pod/Task::BeLike::FIBO](https://metacpan.org/pod/Task::BeLike::FIBO)
and I'm quite glad of my minimal style. Perl is for servers like JavaScript
for the web, it is obiquitous. I like other languages too, but, Perl is really
fun specially for the community, a great one!

------
estrabd
I signed up. Sounds like a good opportunity for those who want to help, but
don't quite know where to get started.

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edibleEnergy
In as well. Hope I don't get something like SOAP::WSDL :)

~~~
neilbowers
Let me check if it's on github ...

------
creaktive
1\. Join the challenge 2\. Get any module assigned 3\. Check the gaps in it's
test coverage using
[https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::Cover](https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::Cover)
4\. MOAR TESTS 5\. Profit!

~~~
pwr22
Doing it manually? Now we've got www.cpancover.com

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wenderen
I'm interested, but I don't know Perl. Is knowing Perl a hard prerequisite?

~~~
chromatic
I wrote a brief introduction to Perl from philosophy to pragmatic efficacy.
It's available free online:

[http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2014/](http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2014/)

It works best with at least six months practical experience in any programming
language.

~~~
wenderen
I'm going through it right now. Looks very useful, thanks for writing.

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kolom
Sounds great, is there anything like this for php?

~~~
hueving
I don't think php has reached the point where a lot of libraries have reached
stagnation.

In general though it would be cool to just automate this in some fashion.
Occasionally email participants a link to projects that haven't had commits in
many months but have open bugs or feature requests.

~~~
oalders
It's not necessarily _just_ about dealing with stagnation. It's also about
finding a way for people to start contributing to open source. If you've never
released anything, just patching someone else's work is a great way to start.
This automates the selection process so you don't necessarily have to look
around for something that needs help.

------
senorsmile
I'm in. Been looking for an excuse to use my budding perl-fu.

------
rohall
Sounds cool, I'd do something like this if it was in Ruby. Haven't used perl
in several years, not sure I'd be much help

~~~
mdaniel
Well, nothing is stopping you from suggesting (or implementing!) this except
the willingness of the target repositories to accept incoming pull requests.
This[0] discussion is especially relevant to that limitation.

I get the impression this CPAN campaign is an attempt to introduce, or
reintroduce, folks to Perl, which might not be as big of a problem with Ruby.
That is, of course, my opinion.

0 =
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8819930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8819930)

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etheleon
absolutely cpancited! should probably come up with a more taggable acronym for
this

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nsxwolf
Sounds desperate.

~~~
damsieboy
Given the number of people registered to the challenge, it looks like it's
going to work just fine

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twerquie
> The goal is to help others, possibly learn something, and hopefully have a
> bit of fun

Seems like it shouldn't be limited to CPAN modules.

~~~
belden
What else would you include?

~~~
twerquie
I guess I was just being a bit cynical, he should have stated a goal to
revitalize CPAN.

