thpfft has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I've studied all the relevant PAUSE documents, and the very useful perlmodstyle. Much of it is pretty fuzzy, but one issue is especially unclear, so I hope someone can clear it up.

In separate sections of the docs there are stern warnings against:</P.

  1. putting your module in the root namespace
  2. arbitrarily assigning yourself namespace territory

And now i can't work out which is the lesser evil. I know there was some debate about this a while ago (on p5p?) but I don't know if the proper course was ever established.

The best thing seems to be to upload with the name I think it should have and then write to modules@ explaining that this is tentative and asking for feedback before making a formal namespace request. Does that sound right to you?

It's also quite hard to work out the best place for a bit of peer review. This isn't quite it, I think: 100 lines of code and 300 lines of pod aren't going to go over all that well in sopw.

So any suggestions for arenas in which to enjoy a bit of constructive humiliation would be most useful. It's an HTML:: sort of thing. Maybe. modperl list?

thanks.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: cpan etiquette
by suaveant (Parson) on Sep 20, 2001 at 23:00 UTC
    I have actually simply asked here on perlmonks about their opinions on the namespace of my modules... there are certainly plenty of PAUSE registered users here... :)

                    - Ant
                    - Some of my best work - Fish Dinner

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Re: cpan etiquette
by Sweeper (Pilgrim) on Sep 21, 2001 at 00:42 UTC
    You should read http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/modules/04pause.html which gives you all the etiquette to contribute to CPAN.

    For the module name in particular, you should begin a new thread in comp.lang.perl.modules, with the traditional subject "Module name request". And there you explain what your module does, what name(s) you are thinking of, and so on.

[reply]
      A few additional thoughts

      You should begin this thread before you upload your module to CPAN. If the result of the discussion is that you must adopt a new name, you would have trouble changing the module name. Worse, you could have a name clash with somebody else's module.

      If you want peer review, you can create your module with a provisional name, and upload it to your homepage. And don't forget to say the name may change when the module is available on CPAN.

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Re: cpan etiquette
by perrin (Chancellor) on Sep 20, 2001 at 23:07 UTC
    The mod_perl list is the right place for Apache::* modules, but a general HTML::* module would probably be off-topic there. It depends. HTML::Template is widely used with mod_perl, so new releases get announced there.
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