Declarative knowledge on the CPAN

I was struck today once again by the realization that CPAN contains a lot of declarative knowledge hidden inside various modules. This time it's Date::Calendar::Profiles, which contains a great deal of information about holidays around the world. A CPAN module is probably not the best place to maintain that stuff, but there it is.

Curation and CPAN

Construing CPAN as citations made it clear to me what isn't provided in the existing CPAN ecosystem.

That's an interesting thought.

Taking over CPAN modules

Here are some notes on taking over CPAN modules.  I can officially confirm that this works, because I have taken on co-maintainership of Iterator::Simple.  (Yeah, I'm still pretty enthused.)

• The official PAUSE guide to taking over a module.
• Identifying CPAN modules that need help

In the comments to the latter one, Neil Bowers describes his own procedure, which is the one I used:

• Find and solve a problem with a module.  (This is sometimes the hard part.)
• Post a patch to RT.
• Fork the module on Github (this is a little pie-in-the-sky, so put the module on Github, the point being to have an open repository you can refer to)
• Don't forget to update the repo with meta-information to point to itself.  (I didn't do this for Iterator::Simple, durr.)  More Github integration is a benefit to everyone.
• Two weeks after this, email the author at whatever email addresses you can find, remind him or her of the patch, point to the Github repo, and offer to take over co-maint.  Copy modules@perl.org on this email.
• One month after that, notify PAUSE that you haven't heard back.
• Wrap and upload your new version.

Wash, rinse, repeat: slow but certain world domination.

Proclet

There's a lot of really cool stuff on CPAN.

Shell modules in Perl

I've always just used Term::Shell - it seems to be used a lot, but after a little extra searching, I think maybe I prefer Term::ShellUI, which is newer and more flexible.

Here's another argument for some kind of curation or functional grouping of CPAN.

Incidentally, looking for shell modules, I also ran across Net::CLI::Interact, used for talking to shells over the  network.

Update 2012-10-02: Yep, Term::ShellUI is a pure joy to work with.  (I started Shell::SQP based on it yesterday, with entirely satisfactory results.)

CPAN is big

30,000 packages...

If about a thousand of those are HTTP-related, well - what do the rest do? That would actually be a kind of neat thing to figure out. I keep talking about code understanding; maybe CPAN is a reasonable target? Just attempting a global survey would be edifying.

Sort of a "Things people do with Perl."

(Ever notice you can tell from this blog how little sleep I've had the night before?)

Parse::Indented on CPAN

Bit by bit, I'm establishing a useful toolset here.

I've been spending too much time today in organizing the unit tests for Class::Declarative. Test-driving programming has a higher initial threshold, but once you get the framework all set up, it really starts to take shape.

Anyway, Class::Declarative is parsing properly now; you'd think this would already work, but I spent some time generalizing the semantic framework to make it easy to build new semantic domains. I think this is really going to pay off in the medium term.