All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

RFC: Looking for "CPAN Trivia and Bizarre Tales of the CPAN"

cog on 2006-12-12T14:10:28

I'm preparing a new (possibly lightning) talk on CPAN trivia and the most bizarre things regarding CPAN.

An example of a bizarre tale:

  • On Devel::Profile's documentation one can read: "SEE ALSO: Yellowstone National Park."


And an example of some CPAN trivia:

  • There are many PAUSE ids with zero uploaded distributions. Is it just because people get an id and then they forget about it? No, it's also because some people actually apply for an id just to help out on a certain module and thus need access to RT, some people upload a module but later on find someone else to take over it but keep the id anyway, etc.


That's the kind of stuff I'm looking for, and I'll probably mix the the trivia with the bizarre tales. I have some material already, but I'm sure if I ask around others will have many more stories to tell.

So, anyone?

Schwern's modules

clscott on 2006-12-12T14:47:08

Some (most? all) of Schwern's modules have interesting "true values" at the end instead of the plain boring old
1;

I'm pretty sure that he's not the only one but his are the first I ever noticed.

Re:Schwern's modules

jk2addict on 2006-12-12T18:49:36

Ha ha.....Class::Virtual...

return "Club sandwich";

Re:Schwern's modules

Abigail on 2006-12-13T09:03:47

For a while I had the habit of returning the POD segment as the return value of the module. Not sure if any such module still lurks on CPAN.

I've had a PAUSE id for a long time...

bart on 2006-12-12T18:24:46

... so I can tell you first hand why it took so long (I don't know, a year or so) to upload my first module.

It's because of perfectionism. I wanted my first upload to be right, I was afraid to do a bad first one, so it actually took me a long time to pull myself together and actually upload something. I hope the threshold for the next ones will be lower...

I'm sure that quite a few of people with PAUSE ids but no module are feeling the same: afraid to make a fool of themselves.

Re:I’ve had a PAUSE id for a long time...

Aristotle on 2006-12-18T04:24:13

Yep! I can attest that.

Bender

jk2addict on 2006-12-12T19:04:26

While not on CPAN, I've always been fond of the Futurama/Bender quotes in the SlashCode.

Two of my own and one more general

Damian on 2006-12-12T21:47:44

The docs for Coy are written in haiku.

The head1's in the docs for Lingua::Romana::Perligata are in Latin.

Try this:

http://search.cpan.org/search?m=all&q=blah%20blah%20blah
and see how many results you get.

Re:Two of my own and one more general

hfb on 2006-12-13T23:40:28

What now doctor? Being coy about Acme::Bleach starting a hot new trend of seeing who could upload the next Acme module to outdo the last? :)

namespace wars

mr_bean on 2006-12-13T00:06:10

I'd like some stories of namespace conflict that has occurred. What are the human stories behind the computer face?

Re:namespace wars

Abigail on 2006-12-13T09:02:04

Not really a namespace conflict, but certainly namespace related. For years, one of my modules wasn't indexed. Reason: one of the components of the name contains 17 characters, and the indexing software couldn't cope with that.

The Whatif Documentation

muttley on 2006-12-13T14:52:56

Bad form to pimp your ownb stuff, I know but I've always been fond of the documentation and README for Whatif

It includes the disclaimer

"This software is under no warranty and will probably destroy your life, kill your friends, burn your house and bring about the apocalypse."

Heroic, valiant efforts

DAxelrod on 2006-12-13T20:33:01

How about the tale of how cascade failure resulting in a thrid of CPAN being uninstallable was averted?

For more info see: