All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Maintenance of Error.pm

Shlomi Fish on 2006-03-29T18:43:30

I'd like to ask the help of the "use Perl;" readers in trying to regain maintenance of the Error.pm CPAN module, which provides object-oriented exception-handling in Perl 5.

The module has been unmaintained since October 2001 (over 4 years ago) and has six registered bugs in the CPAN bugtracker, one of them 2 years old.

I've tried to contact the maintainer through his Yahoo and Hotmail E-mail addresses six days ago. One address bounced, and I've yet to hear from the other. One should note that the last of his module updates was at December, 2002.

If you know how to reach the maintainer, please comment here and give me some help. Else, I request the CPAN gods to give me (or a more suitable volunteer) a co-maintainership of the module, so I can fix the bugs, and continue to maintain it.

Patience! In the meantime...

bart on 2006-03-29T19:56:23

6 days is nothing. He could be on holiday, or something. Of course, I admit, having done nothing visible to the Perl community in over 3 years doesn't look too good, so he could have lost interest in Perl, disappeared, or worse — in recent times, we've seen a few announcements of deaths of CPAN authors. Let's hope it's not that bad.

I still must plead for you to show some patience. In the meantime, nothing is stopping you from trying to fix those bugs. You can even present your proposed fixes to the world, asking other people to comment on them... it'll all help in presenting your case, maybe even gaining (co)maintainership of said module.

Re:Patience! In the meantime...

Shlomi Fish on 2006-03-30T10:31:34

I think he's gone for good. But fixing the problems now is a good idea, so that's what I intend to do in the meantime. Thanks!

Re:Patience! In the meantime...

Shlomi Fish on 2006-03-30T18:34:34

OK, per your advice, a new version of Error.pm that I began to work on is now available. It already contains two bug-fixes and some re-organisation of the module's layout. Expect more bug-fixes as time goes by.

Re:Patience! In the meantime...

Alias on 2006-03-31T04:50:01

What on earth is that link?

The link

Shlomi Fish on 2006-03-31T11:06:44

It's an svn:// URL as mutilated by Slashcode. Here is is in plaintext:

svn://svn.berlios.de/web-cpan/Error.pm/trunk/module/

Taking over maintenance

Alias on 2006-03-29T23:07:28

While I'm currently in a badly overloaded period, and not doing my shift on as a module@ person until late next month, the standard for contacting authors I generally ask people to apply is "several times over several weeks by several methods". It's not a hard and fast rule, but it works in most cases.

That is, you try to contact the author a number of times by various email accounts you can find (because sometimes ones might go dark) over a period of time, and look for any other avenues you have to hunt them down (Instant messenger, Skype phone, land line telephone, etc).

Sometimes it's obvious they are gone. For example, in one case last year the author had only every released one module 5 years ago, and was now the CIO of a fairly large company.

And yes, having no action on their CPAN account for 3 years despite bug reports hanging around is a pretty good sign. And most of the time, once you track the author down they'll either fix the bugs now you are squeaking, or be happy for you to take over maintainership.

And if you can't, give me buzz via my cpan.org address and I'll sort it out for you.

Re:Taking over maintenance

Shlomi Fish on 2006-03-30T10:40:55

Well, his CPAN page only contains an E-mail address, and there's another E-mail address on his module page. I sent an email to both. He doesn't list an IM account, and Skype did not exist back then, and I don't know what his telephone number is. A google search for him returns the CPAN pages as the first two hits, and junk afterwards. A Google search for just "Arun Kumar" returns a lot of different people. So email is my only way.

Thanks for your offer regarding buzzing your cpan.org address. Meanwhile, I'll just fix the bugs in my own version.

Re:Taking over maintenance

Alias on 2006-03-30T13:53:28

I do hope that means your local version, rather than forking it :)

Re:Taking over maintenance

Shlomi Fish on 2006-03-30T18:39:36

Well, it's a version that I maintain until the maintenance of the module resume. It is, however, publicly available. I do not intend it to be a fork.

Two maintainers listed on PAUSE

speters on 2006-03-30T00:46:38

Looking at PAUSE, there are two registered maintainers of Error: Arun Kumar U and Graham Barr, the original author. Arun Kumar U is the current maintainer, so I would continue to attempt to contact him and leave Graham out of it.

I would, however, second bart's idea above. If you have bug fixes (rather than enhancements), I would send them to the author and RT queue for the module. I'm sure that all involved would be more responsive to patches for fixes for existing bugs.

Google Fu

Limbic Region on 2006-03-30T13:49:48

Ok, so you tried googling for just Arun Kumar and came up with a myriad of results that obviously were not the right person - did you try filtering those results by adding another keyword - namely perl?

I found this address Arun.Kumar AT three.co.uk for an Arun Kumar who was asking for the ppd files for DBI

I don't feel bad about posting his email address here since I did find it on a publicly indexed webpage but I did change the @ symbol.

That was in August of 2005. There is no guarantee it is the same person but it might be a better lead.

There is also his UARUN AT cpan.org account though I am pretty sure he isn't checking that anymore either

I also found he has a SourceForge account - http://sourceforge.net/project/memberlist.php?group_id=20987

u_arun at users.sourceforge.net

Oh, I also found an Arun Kumar on the comp.lang.perl mailing list - http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Perl/comp.lang.perl.misc/2005-01/1551.html

The email address is smsabu2002_at_yahoo.com posted Jan of 2005

I found a bunch of other possibilities too but they were a bit too far down for me to consider them likely matches. On the other hand, if you strike out with this stuff perhaps it would be worth fishing further.

Cheers,
L~R

Re:Google Fu

Shlomi Fish on 2006-03-30T18:31:00

Hi Limbic Region!

Thanks for your Google-Fu! Hopefully it would prove helpful in tracking him down.

Re:Google Fu

Shlomi Fish on 2006-03-31T11:55:10

Well, after I sent an email to these three accounts, the yahoo.com address bounced saying:

host mx3.mail.yahoo.com[67.28.113.10] said: 554 delivery error: dd Sorry your message to foo@bar cannot be delivered. This account has been disabled or discontinued

Also, the SourceForge address bounced saying "an undisclosed address". I'm still waiting on the .co.uk address.

So, there still isn't any luck in trying to reach him.