I'll resist the fact your language comes across as trollish, and put it down to your more formalised training and corporate environments.

To my knowledge CPAN is, without exception, the single best repository for canonical Open Source code in existance.

That doesn't prevent us wanting to make it better, but it is far FAR more than a "code dump".

CPAN has 3500 contributing authors, 10,000 distributions, something in the order of 45-50,000 classes, and a total of around 20 million lines of source code.

EVERY distribution automatically gets bug tracking set up for it, without needing to be configured, and tracks the permissions of the modules themselves.

See http://rt.cpan.org/ for that.

There is a single search and browsing interface across the entire CPAN, with links to all sorts of interesting tools.

See http://search.cpan.org/ for that.

Most modules are automatically downloaded to a distributed build farm when a new version is uploaded, and have their unit test suite exercised and the success/fail results reported.

See http://testers.cpan.org/ for that.

Every module is automatically scanned for errors at a source code level. This catches bad packages, various problems of various types, and does not need to actually build the modules to do so.

See http://cpants.perl.org/ for that.

Every modules automatically gets added to an annotative documentation website, where the users can add notes and caveats and what have you to the documentation without the author having to merge it back in.

Every module can be commented on, and the reviews of these modules are collated into a "5 star" rating system. And this also integrates with the search website, as does the bug tracker, annotation site, and so on and so forth.

Every module is available via 330 different mirrors worldwide within 24 hours of upload.

To implement all of that above (excluding the mirrors) takes an administrative team of I believe no more than a dozen people.

There are 1-2 people that spend 10 minutes a day registering new users, and a team of about 3 people that spend half an hour or so a day administer permissions and doing namespace control, and handle continuity of service for modules (making sure modules get handed of to new maintainers).

And there's 1 head admin, who also happens to be the founder, that has to do something directly to the whole shebang once or twice a week.

And nobody gets paid.

The reason the CPAN works so well, and is the envy of the open source programming world, is that it is so incredibly efficient at scale.

While a single module may well be crap on the first day it is uploaded, it will be tested and analyzed and be open for user review and this creates the incentive to keep improving modules. The users can be certain that the module won't just dissapear on them, and there will always be a new maintainer (if needed, them).

If you were to pay someone full time to look after the CPAN, you could collapse the entire user/namespace/head parts down to less than 1 person's job.

If you want to install something, and it depends on something else, recursively down 40 authors and 50 modules, it just works.

If we "forced" people to fill out extra paperwork, they'd simply just not upload.

Once you get used to using the CPAN, and really get why it works, you'll wonder how you ever did without it.

In reply to Re^2: Is it worth tracking down absent cpan owners? by adamk
in thread Is it worth tracking down absent cpan owners? by jfroebe

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