A talk I gave at the London Perl Workshop 2013, about automatically identifying CPAN distributions that might be candidates for adoption.

1. Finding CPAN Adoption
Candidates
Neil Bowers
NEILB
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2. A long time ago …
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3. 3

4. My first thought …
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5. 5

6. A lot of stale distributions on CPAN
• But some are 'finished', not 'stale'
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7. 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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8. 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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9. Bug score
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10. Are other dists using this dist?
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11. Total usage graph
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12. 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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13. Adoptability score
• Gating criteria – score = 0 if
• bug_score = 0, NEEDHELP, core with upstream=blead
• Otherwise score according to a rule set:
bug score
10 or more bugs reported since last release
dependent distributions
CPAN Testers
0 to 3
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1 + log10( $dep_dists )
1 or 2
core module (CPAN upstream)
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ADOPTME or HANDOFF
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Single module in dist
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Single user has PAUSE permissions
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Author hasn't released anything in 3+ years
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14. neilb.org/adoption
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15. 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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16. 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
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