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Finding CPAN Adoption Candidates

Neil Bowers

NEILB

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A long time ago …

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My first thought …

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• But some are 'finished', not 'stale'

A lot of stale distributions on CPAN

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Goal

• How can we identify the 'best' candidates?

• Distributions that might be open to adoption …

• That are of value to CPAN / Perl programmers

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Bugs reported since release

• Bugs being reported a long time after last release?

• Suggests that the module is (still) being used

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Bug score

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Are other dists using this dist?

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Total usage graph

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CPAN Testers

• All dists have three parts to their CPAN Testers score:• # passes• # fails• # unknowns

• Skip dists with fewer than 50 reports

• +2 if fails + unknowns >= 50%

• +1 if fails + unknowns >= 5%

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Adoptability score

• Gating criteria – score = 0 if• bug_score = 0, NEEDHELP, core with upstream=blead

• Otherwise score according to a rule set:bug score 0 to 3

10 or more bugs reported since last release 1

dependent distributions 1 + log10( $dep_dists )

CPAN Testers 1 or 2

core module (CPAN upstream) 2

ADOPTME or HANDOFF 1

Single module in dist 1

Single user has PAUSE permissions 1

Author hasn't released anything in 3+ years 1

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neilb.org/adoption

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Adopting a module

• Fork it on github (see gitpan)

• Fix some/all outstanding bugs

• Follow up in bug-tracker, & offer to do a release

• Email author via all addresses you can find online

• After 2 weeks try again, and try other avenues• Ask on IRC, email module-authors, perlmonks

• After 1 month, email modules@perl.org, cc author• They'll give you co-maint permissions• You might want to ask for ownership after 6 months

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What's next?

• Split score into value & adoptability• Ability to generate other lists, such as "dists that need help"

• New factors• +1 if CPAN Testers says it needs help• +1 if ++'d on MetaCPAN• +1 if outstanding pull request(s) on github

• Get the adoption score into MetaCPAN• Add this into MetaCPAN, or• Generate JSON for MetaCPAN to import• or?

• Exclude build dependencies from the dep graph