Maintaining CPAN Modules

Dave Cross [email_address]

CPAN is Perl's Killer App

16,645 modules 7,695 authors 6,129 MB 244 mirrors

I have 24 distributions on CPAN

Array::Compare AudioFile::Info AudioFile::Info::MP3::ID3Lib Audiofile::Info::MP3::Info AudioFile::Info::MP3::Tag AudioFile::Info::Ogg::Vorbis::Header AudioFile::Info::Ogg::Vorbis::Header::PurePerl Calendar::Simple Guardian::OpenPlatform::API Net::Backpack Number::Fraction Parse::RPM::Spec Perlanet Symbol::Approx::Sub Template::Plugin::AudioFile::Info Template::Plugin::RPM2 Template::Plugin::XML::Feed Tie::Hash::Cannabinol Tie::Hash::FixedKeys Tie::Hash::Regex WWW::Shorten WWW::Shorten::Qurl WWW::Shorten::Qwer WWW::Shorten::SnipURL

Not actually a huge number

MIYAGAWA has 149 ADAMK has 201

But 24 is enough to make maintenance a chore

Some things you don't need to worry about

Distribution

Installation

Testing

Cross-platform Testing

Some things you do need to worry about

Bug tracking

Source code control

Maintenance and enhancements

So what do you do?

Get help

Use other people's tools

Bug tracking

RT is awesome

Every CPAN module gets an RT queue

rt.cpan.org

Mention that in your module documentation

You'll still get email

RT accepts reports by mail

TIP: Redirect, don't forward

TIP: Send bugs to yourself

Use RT to remember everything you need to do to your modules

Source code control

I used to host my own Subversion repository

Far too much like hard work

Git is Good

Github is Great

Free source code repository for Open Source projects

Distributed source code control

Easy for people to fork and patch your code

Patches are better than bug reports

Patches with associated tests are even better

Github also gives you a wiki

Github also gives you a bug tracker

I ♥ Github

Maintenance and Enhancement

Let's trace a typical change

Change request comes in

RT ticket or CPAN test failure or I have an idea

Check out latest revision from Github

Write tests

Yes Write tests before writing code

Tests tell you when you are finished

Write code until tests pass

Write tests until ALL tests pass

Don't care which editor you use

But use a decent programmer's editor

Take time to configure it to your tastes

Have tests to test quality of distribution

Test::Pod Test::Pod::Coverage Devel::Cover

Tools to monitor quality of code

Perl::Tidy Perl::Critic

Commit changes to Github

Tag for release e.g. RELEASE_1.07

Build distribution upload to CPAN (cpan-upload)

PAUSE takes care of the rest

I also release to my web site code.mag-sol.com

Code available on Github github.com/davorg

Brief aside on building distributions

ExtUtils::MakeMaker Module::Build Module::Install

Helpful stuff on CPAN that I should really investigate

Module::Starter

Module::Release

Maintaining CPAN module need not be hard work

This is supposed to be fun

Plenty of help out there

Plenty of tools to use

Please join in