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Postings from November 2011
Re: The CPAN Covenant
From:
Steffen Mueller
Date:
November 22, 2011 00:50
Subject:
Re: The CPAN Covenant
Message ID:
4ECA94E6.3030605@cpan.org
On 11/21/2011 09:58 AM, Neil Bowers wrote:
> Maybe instead of just this Covenant, we have a number of Ownership /
> Maintenance statements, one of which is the one I proposed, but
> another of which would something along the lines of:
>
> This is my module, I don't want it handing over unless I've either
> (a) bestowed (co-)maint using PAUSE (b) have explicitly given the
> PAUSE admins permission to bestow it
Let's make this explicit statement opt-in. It bars us from ever touching
the module if the author disappears.
> And by default everyone could be tagged with this. Much as I might
> wish that the default could be more open, there are clearly people
> who are more aligned with the above, so that would have to be the
No. That would be a disaster. The default must be "The author has not
spoken on this matter" and we must be very clear on whatever page lists
the various statements that choosing the above is a very serious
problem. Or don't offer this kind of choice at all. Nobody forces us to
provide the authors with an EXPLICIT mechanism to shoot themselves and
the whole community in the foot.
If in doubt, we follow the 04pause.html#takeover procedure which I'd
summarize as "take care and respect the author".
>>> (1) There are outstanding issues in the module's public bug
>>> tracker (2) The requester wants to make worthwhile changes that
>>> will benefit CPAN
>>
>> Not even require an email to the author? Really?
>
> Yes, I think that could be one of the ownership statements. I
> recently took over a module where both previous maints clearly had no
> interest, but it just took a long time to determine that fact :-)
Fair enough. Though I'd like to see an intermediate like "the above, but
please do send a note to the author".
>>> (c) a feature on PAUSE, where you can select the "ownership
>>> status" or similar
>>
>> This would be the place where you mark an author as endorser.
>
> endorser?
Sorry, probably a language FAIL here. "The place where you mark an
entire author as endorsing the covenant".
Cheers,
Steffen