AFAIK Dave Mitchell's work on 5.10.1 is the first time that someone has been paid to release a version of Perl. Though Sarathy's work on the 5.005 series related enough to his day job at Active State that perhaps that qualified. As for the $50,000 grant, whatever it has been used for, it has not been used to make Raphael's life easier.

Which brings us to a chicken and egg problem regarding releases. If you make releases often, you identify the issues with releasing and create infrastructure that makes it easier to release. If you don't, then every time you go to make a release, that infrastructure is not there. And things change enough between releases that it is hard to define what that infrastructure should be. So it is much, much easier to maintain a working process than to fix a broken one.

I agree that the Perl 5 release process is broken. Which makes it easy to identify things that would make releases easier. You have identified many. However solving any one of them requires an investment of time and effort. Solving enough of them to make releases take a reasonable amount of effort would require a lot of time and effort. And this is time and effort devoted to something that most people don't like doing.

If you enumerate issues in this case, I agree with you that money won't be the direct problem. You won't find that the bottleneck isn't that you didn't pay for the bandwidth to upload a changed file. However solving the direct problems requires an investment of time and effort. And money is a remarkably good way to get time and effort to be applied to boring problems. So while money isn't the problem, it is likely to be a necessary part of the solution.

In reply to Re^6: When comment turns into disaster by tilly
in thread When comment turns into disaster by Tux

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