If people are reinventing wheels, they are usually not contributing useful patches and ideas to CPAN.
Really? If someone reinvents a wheel by creating a module that does X, while there is already a module doing X, he basically made a patch the size of a module. Reinventing wheels is usually done because someone didn't like the original wheel. It's often more efficient to reinvent a round wheel, than to submit patches for a square wheel (if only the creator of the square wheel likes squares, or because round wheels aren't compatible with the vehicles equipped with square wheels).

A strong CPAN makes my life easier. Also, it has been my experience that despite what you say about integration problems, reinventing wheels usually leads to wasted time, less functionality, and more bugs, all of which makes Perl look bad.

There are no quality requirements for CPAN. Anyone can already load any crap on CPAN, and many already do. Non-overlapping functionality doesn't make CPAN stronger, it probably makes it weaker. Choice is good (remember one of the slogans of Perl: there's more than one way of doing it?) Your reasoning would mean that the first module doing Y that was uploaded to CPAN is necessary the best one. Good heavens. Had Matt Wright made his formmail.pl available on CPAN, you would have preferred noone else would have created a form to email utility, but they all had used Matt's script.

Abigail

In reply to Re: Litmus test: It's ok to roll your own if... by Abigail-II
in thread Litmus test: It's ok to roll your own if... by davido

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.