Most modules are no in some sort of reproducable VCS: svn or git, and most have some sort of preferred way of contributions (github).

If people want to work on a module/distribution, a git clone or svn copy will get you *all* files, including those that - I agree with tobyink here - are listed in .gitignore and MANIFEST.SKIP. I hope at least that the authors are sane enough to have these two in the repository anyway.

I do keep modules in public Git repos, and in the module's POD point to that repo. Nevertheless, when someone looks for a distribution, they look to CPAN, and I try to provide the complete dist there. Anyway, the good thing about Perl is that TIMTOWTDI. :)




Dave

The module POD is not the only place where your repo must be linked. The most important place is the distribution metadata: the resources section of META.{yaml,json}

This is important because the metadata can be processed by programs while the POD is only for humans.

We can not rely only on the source repository of the author to get the original source. First, too few authors advertise the place of that repository in their metadata. Then, the author may decide to make it private, or delete it completely. Look at what happened to Marcel Grunauer 200+ modules when he dropped his Github account in August 2011...

The only reliable archive is the CPAN. This is where the source must be.

This is why I hate tools that transform the original source : PodWeaver, Dist::Zilla::Plugin::ExtraTests...

and think it's ok to distribute the /xt directory (or author-only tests)

I agree. Even if the tests are never run by someone else, they might still prove a valuable resource to another author. And if (somewhat unexpectedly cause my code is always perfect) bug reports start flooding in, it is always a good thing to have all existing tests for the distribution already deployed. It's much easier to ask a user to "just run this command(s) and post the output" than first having to haggle about how to send the test scripts and set up the test environment.