All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

New maintainer for GraphViz::DBI

TeeJay on 2003-03-20T15:37:03

I have adopted the GraphViz::DBI module.

This afternoon Marcel changed the maintenance of the module over to me.

This is because he hasn't the time to work on it, and I have been integrating some of its code into Autodia and wish to merge some of the improvements back into the module

This brings my CPAN module count up to a measly 4. Hardly MJD, but a start.

Thank you!

jordan on 2003-03-20T17:44:24

We consumers of CPAN modules thank you producers for your fine efforts.

I must say, that I've never seen community code that, for the most part, is so well packaged, documented and coded than the treasures of CPAN. Sure, there is some crap out there, too, but it's pretty easy to sort out.

I hope to be able to join the ranks of CPAN contributors some day. It's a high calling!

Thanks!

gettings started with contributions

TeeJay on 2003-03-20T18:03:48

One of the best ways of getting started with contributing is to give feedback

There are many ways of giving feedback

  • Email the author
  • use rt.cpan.org
  • Email the appropriate mailing list
All of these are appreciated.

There are also some important guidelines on giving error reports

  • Give as much information as possible
    - what version of the module, which version of perl, which linux distro, what you did, etc
  • Try the latest version - it may have been fixed already
  • Check its not a mistake in your own code
  • Check its not a mistake in your own code again
  • google for other people having the same problem, check mailing lists to see if its already been reported or if there is a work around
  • If it hasn't been reported and you are using an up to date version try and work-around it - a work around is usually half-way to providing a patch
  • If you find a work around or can see the problem try and provide a patch - even if the author doesn't use your patch it provides a starting point.
I get between 2 and 5 emails a week from autodia users - most are people having genuine problems either with bugs or dodgy perl installations or lack of a feature and occasionally people who didn't read the documentation or understand it and or perl.

I am lucky in that my code is aimed at developers rather than end users and beginners - Dave Cross has the NMA project and receives a huge ammount of email from people who a) think he runs a site that has installed one of his scripts, b) didn't read the documentation or c) are very very stupid.