in reply to Choosing modules - community matters or just technical merits?

Community is big. I've seen one major Perl ORM and one major framework get temporarily shut down because of people problems. In one case, a CPAN administrator stepped in to mediate the problem. When the ORM project was shut down temporarily, my first thought was "What will I use if this never comes back?".

I think everyone has had their ego involved with their code at some point or another in their career. I know I have, but I try to make conscious efforts to become detached from it. This is a problem with coding teams, egos clash, and the code goes to shit. That ORM I mentioned hasn't really recovered from the meltdown. I try to keep an open mind, but I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

Be careful of a community with too many zealots and not enough level headed individuals. Enthusiasm is great, but when it turns predatory, or I might even say cannibalistic in the event the predation is towards other Perl modules, people end up looking like idiots and the Perl community as a whole suffers. We're all members of the Perl community.

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Re^2: Choosing modules - community matters or just technical merits?
by Anonymous Monk on Feb 02, 2008 at 17:55 UTC

    I'm the supposed "associate of the troublemaker" here.

    He's referring to Class::DBI and DBIx::Class - except that I always was and still am on good terms with Tony Bowden (the maintainer of Class::DBI) and in fact he supported the creation of DBIx::Class, which was announced -before- the blow-up on the class-dbi mailing list (sadly by about two days, so lots of people managed to get the wrong impression) after a week's worth of offlist discussion between myself and Tony.

    Sure, draw your own conclusions. But draw them from what actually happened, please - I was as unhappy about the demise of the list as anybody else and in fact the dbix-class list took Class::DBI questions during its first few weeks until the replacement cdbi-talk list could be set up. Anybody who doesn't believe me about this is welcome to go ask Tony :)

    -- mst
[reply]

      hi mst

      Thanks for clearing that up, I did have an impression that was different than what actually happened. I had some second thoughts and updated my post to remove the troublemaker statement, I didn't notice that you had posted a reply until today. I can get a bit grumpy at times :)

      For what it is worth, I'm a heavy DBIx::Class user, I've found it to be quite good.

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