jns writes "I made this post to comp.lang.perl.modules and received a surprising amount of feedback for such a low traffic group so I have been encouraged to bring it here.
The basic premise is that all of us who use modules from CPAN should at least once in a while provide some feedback to the authors of those modules. I don't think that the authors do what they do for adulation and praise, but I do think they are interested in what people think of there creations and what the use them for.
So go on mail a CPAN author today
There are plenty of opportunities and reminders to give authors constructive feedback. I've begged and pleaded before that the CPAN testers need more people to test modules and give feedback on modules. I also mention this a few times in the Grokking the CPAN talk I did at TPC this year. All it takes is a little motivation of the hands, not the mouth
Re:If you want to give feedback....
belg4mit on 2001-10-28T15:10:37
I dunno, I'd take whatever I can get.
All I ever hear about is people's problems
with Net::Interface. And I'm not the author
I just posted a devel version (1.04_1 I think);
with a "fix" to the XS code to fecth MAC addresses; which also means it oughn't be downloaded unless you're willing to play with it, right? I'm not really complaing I just don't
ever know what to tell these people.Re:If you want to give feedback....
jns on 2001-10-28T15:13:13
Extremely useful though it is (and I promise to sign up to help the testing effort:) I dont the CPAN testers is necessarily what I am talking about. I think its more a thing of the people who are really using the modules to be giving some feedback as to how useful (or not) they find them and what they are using them for - now if the testing mechanism could be extended to include facilities for this then we would be laughing.
/J\
Re:If you want to give feedback....
hfb on 2001-10-28T15:23:30
The CPAN Testers is an already established constructive mechanism for providing useful feedback to authors not only for cross-platform functionality but for other comments as well...and these are made publicly available via the search.cpan.org interface. It's nothing fancy, but then again, it doesn't need to be. Lots of people talk about this sort of thing yet the testers go unloved....I swear, if more people were testers and gave useful/constructive feedback, it would be a much more appreciated resource.
Re:If you want to give feedback....
jns on 2001-10-28T15:38:31
OK OK I've signed up;-}
No I do agree. Having looked at the number of people who are actually involved in the testing and the number of modules that are uploaded I would also like to encourage people to help with the testing.
I'll get london.pm on the gig right away;-}
/J\Re:If you want to give feedback....
clintp on 2001-10-28T18:30:24
I generally have no interest in testing modules. Perl is my langauge for getting stuff done.
I download modules and if they work, great. If they don't (are poorly documented, flaky, or need a lot of "tweaking") I download something else. (There's almost no point is writing the author to say that something doesn't work without a patch.) Lather, rinse, repeat until something works.
Those few non-core modules that really save me a lot of time and effort I make a point to send a note to the author saying "THANK YOU" and offer burnt livestock as a token of appreciation. [The current list of modules saving my bacon on the project du jour are:
- PDF::Create
- Spreadsheet::WriteExcel
- LWP::Useragent
- Tk
And I do believe at one time or another I've sent each of the responsible parties a thank you.]
hfb: for those that have the time, sure this is great. Got something a little less involved in the works? I really don't want to join Yet Another Mailing List or wade through a lot of instructions.
If I've just downloaded Foo::Bar::Poit, it'd be nice to have a quick, easy, obvious way to say "Foo::Bar::Poit was great" or that it sucked terribly? The software was fine but the docs were awful? Needs more examples? Awkward interface? This also solves the problem of not being able to get a hold of a CPAN author to deliver praise, which happens a lot.Re:If you want to give feedback....
koschei on 2001-10-28T19:06:47
Combine this with the request for new features of use.perl.org the other day/week and you get a nice new feature!
The Module Reviewer!
You enter the module's name and what you thought of it, and it goes off and tells the author, and (providing you give a rating as well) allows module rankings! Comments about the module can be public or private, natch.Re:If you want to give feedback....
jns on 2001-10-29T15:44:17
"I download modules and if they work, great. If they don't (are poorly documented, flaky, or need a lot of "tweaking") I download something else. (There's almost no point is writing the author to say that something doesn't work without a patch.) Lather, rinse, repeat until something works."
I have tended recently to mail the author if something could be useful but just needs fixing a little bit to make it really useful - and I would hope that people would do the same to me - indeed they do
;-} I guess though that CPAN does make this iterative discovery of useful things too easy sometimes - it is quicker to download something else than to discover what is actually wrong with a module and create a patch
/J\ Re:If you want to give feedback....
unobserved on 2001-10-29T14:24:16
spooky, i did this for the first time the day before this post when i noticed sam tregar's HTML::Template::Expr
