[mplspm]: Submitting patches to module maintainers

[James.FitzGibbon]

At last night's meeting, there was a point raised about maintainers
of open source projects and getting them to actually incorporate them
into future releases.  I had an idea on the way home that I wanted to
bounce off people.

I think one of the big problems with reporting bugs and submitting
patches is that a) a single email reporting a bug is easily deleted
and forgotten (hopefully not on purpose) and b) if you are too busy
to incorporate the patch, it's difficult to delegate that task to
someone else.

Hopefully most people are familiar with SourceForge, the Open-Source
project hosting site where you can start an Open Source project and
have access to a private CVS repository, web space, the ability to
release tarballs, mailing lists, bug reporting, etc.  If you're not
familiar, please check out www.sf.net.

The idea I had was to promote the idea of getting module developers
to host their modules on SourceForge.  That way when a bug is reported
it goes into the tracking database for that module and the author can't
just indiscriminately delete it.  The author could also start discussion
groups so that potential patch submitters could bounce their ideas off
of other users of the module before sending the final patch to the
author.

Best of all, if the author needed to take a temporary hiatus, it would
be easy to give CVS commit access to a trusted lieutenant who could
take on the task of committing patches.  When the author was ready to
come back, they would be able to track the exact changes that had taken
place in their absence with CVS.

These arguments of course apply to all Open Source projects, not just Perl.
The benefits are (I would argue) required when a project reaches a certain
size, and with the exception of large modules like Event, DBI, Mason, etc.,
people may not have thought about using something like SF for this.

Discuss?

-- 
j.

James FitzGibbon                       voice/fax 612-761-6121/4277 
Consultant, TTS-3D at TPN4H               james.fitzgibbon at target.com


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