I love Perl, CPAN, open source and the freedom it provides. I have used open-source software for 15 years, and I love to be part of a community where we can share and all benefit. Now is the time for me to give back. So what do I do? I submit patches. Usually small snippets, nothing fancy or ground-breaking. Some wrong return values here, some country codes missing there, add a few missing tests over there.

But I'm in doubt. For the last 6 months I have seen more than 3 bug reports or patches submitted through appropriate channels to CPAN modules that remains unanswered. The submissions has either been from people I know or work with, or mine. Some were followed up by attempts to contact a CPAN module author directly, some were not. In no case was there a response. This leads me to doubt the whole idea of CPAN, and especially the single-point-of-failure the single module maintainer represents.

I don't expect any seasoned module author to accept and apply any random patch, but is a response, even a negative one, too much to hope for? Are there models that could work better in the sense that people who want to contribute, although limited in vision and skill, will feel part of it instead of left out?

Please help me restore my faith in CPAN.

Update: Oddly enough, I got a patch (however minor and unimportant) accepted today. My point proven wrong, and my faith in CPAN restored :)

--
No matter how great and destructive your problems may seem now, remember, you've probably only seen the tip of them. [1]

In reply to Losing faith in CPAN - unresponsive module authors by andreas1234567

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