Hi stevieb,

Check the CPAN Adoption List.

The CPAN Pull Request Challenge is the most organized way to participate. You sign up and then get assigned a distribution each month. You are "required" to make at least one pull request on GitHub in the month. It's all automated and using GitHub is super-easy. No guarantee that your PR will be merged, or even seen, if the author is MIA, but mostly it works.

The downside is that you can be assigned any dist at all, no input from volunteers. So you might get something you have no clue about or are not interested in. Or, as in my case this month, something that is so horribly broken that you just don't have the heart or time to fix it.

If you read the CPAN and PAUSE guidelines you'll see that it is encouraged to contact authors directly and offer to contribute, co-maintain, or take over maintenance. You keep the CPAN gods in the loop and they'll facilitate any changes in auth. Many modules and dists have become obsolete or broken due to simple bugs like incompatibilities with newer perls, and the authors are gone. But they can be refurbished fairly easily.

One question I always have is whether it is a good use of time and energy to fix a broken/old module, or better to cold-heartedly leave it behind. (I wish all the garbage was cleaned out of CPAN. But that's another story!)

brian d foy maintains an orphans list at CPAN, that's another option.

Many older modules lack tests, docs, and localization support. I bet you could improve the docs on any module you use! There's usually always room for improvement.

One thing that is lacking in lots of dists, especially the more complex ones, is a Tutorial -- the docs are thin to begin with and scattered in the larger dists, and the dists that have a well-written tutorial showing the real-life implementation of the package are far superior imo. There was a thread about that here in the last couple of days.

Hahaha I went to look for the node id on that thread and found that you have posted an RFC for a tutorial. Well there you go.

If you don't have a GitHub account, git one. You can fork a branch of any project that is on there (many CPAN dists are, but less so among the older ones) and just start making edits and commits to your copy. When you have something to contribute, one button and your "pull request" is sent to the maintainer and your contributions can be automatically merged with the master. It's pretty slick and makes it 1000% times easier to contribute to CPAN than in the past.

Blah blah blah, I hope these late-night ramblings were useful :-)

Remember: Ne dederis in spiritu molere illegitimi!

In reply to Re: How to find a module to contribute to by 1nickt
in thread How to find a module to contribute to by stevieb

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