any idea on how the testing tools could generate a prioritized "TODO" list for anyone motivated to try and fix them?

The old PRC scoring system seems like an obvious place to start. Fill your boots. Be aware that the generated output hasn't been updated since the PRC finished at the end of last year.

Provocative

*yawn* it all repeats

for anyone motivated to try and fix them?

Remember, fix doesn't mean gut, fix doesn't mean radical api changes, closing bug reports isn't fixing bugs, supplying patches (forking) doesn't mean you get to apply them, ...

any idea prioritized TODO ..I know there is a the CPAN River

Do the same thing? Use the open apis? Pick randomly from list or plain cpan?

See maybe https://blog.urth.org/2017/12/25/swimming-in-the-river-of-cpan/ or http://neilb.org/2016/01/26/river-head-quality.html

One random item from cpan-river-3000.perl-5.31.master.psv that you could stumble upon while searching cpan

https://metacpan.org/pod/sanity

    Oct 01, 2014
    Distribution: sanity
    River stage two * 11 direct dependents  * 24 total dependentts
    Module version: 1.03

    Testers (2549 / 8 / 16)
    Kwalitee
    52.82% Coverage

http://cpancover.com/latest/sanity-1.03/index.html

https://cpants.cpanauthors.org/release/BBYRD/sanity-1.03

3 open https://github.com/SineSwiper/sanity/issues

5 year old distributions in various river stages https://metacpan.org/author/BBYRD

Thanks for the links; those are a good start to answering my question.

As for some of the other issues -- those who are new to the Perl ecosystem and community do *not* know where to find information on issues like this. They might not even be familiar with the Perl terminology to ask the right question. I personally searched CPAN testers documentation and it was far from obvious on how to extract the data that I'm looking for, or what would even be considered "improvement" or "fixing" something.

There is a lot of tacit (unspoken) knowledge that gets lost when experienced volunteers move on. The task of those who remain is to structure the environment to encourage new volunteers, and get them working on things that are useful to the community, while beneficial to the individual.

then why write the first paragraph at all

>> I think this "Perl is Dead" meme is way overblown

> then why write the first paragraph at all

Because war is being waged against the Perl community, and if we don't respond, they win. "They" being some other language communities, spreading hateful memes, backed by gigantic corporations. Fight, or die!

"They" don't exist. There is no "us" and "them". There's only us. Some of us prefer other languages, and there's no harm in that. If "they" win, then "we" don't lose.

There is no war against the Perl community, and there never was one. Neither Perl nor the Perl community will die if we don't fight.