Publishing A CPAN Project

This OSDC 2006 talk was presented by Australian developer Leif Eriksen and covered his experience of developing a tool and going through the process of ultimately publishing it at CPAN.

This talk interested me mostly because I have my X Apperator project hosted at sourceforge and have always wondered about the overlap between CPAN (the central repository for Perl libraries) and Sourceforge which is language/community agnostic. It turns out that the policy at CPAN is to host libraries rather than applications, the latter being more appropriately hosted at SF.net

Leif covered the evolution of his Tidy View application which is a TK based GUI layer on top of the Perl Tidy tool to more easily manage its complex configuration files in a structured rather than flat/liner fashion. The idea for the app sprung out of discussions during OSDC2005.

Before unleashing on the broader Perl community Leif presented the tool to the Australian perl mongers, got a few downloads and some feedback but not as much as he expected. Next step was to create a sourceforge home for the project where he once again got a few more d/ls and comments. He found the release process at SF to be a royal pain, and I can concur with that following my own experience with X Apperator. Leif recommended use of Module::Release to reduce the pain of the process.

Finally he plucked up the courage to apply to have the libraries hosted/distributed at CPAN. There was a little of the aforementioned resistance re it being an app, but it was accepted. One be

Leif also recommended seeking input/critique of your projects components from domain experts in each of the elements of it rather than relying on a broader community to give feedback as this will probably be of a more general nature.

See Also: OSDC 2006 | Perl | Web Development | Notes Index

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