I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoyed Olaf Alders’ talk, Whither Perl, at the Perl and Raku Conference in Toronto last month. I think it’s well worth spending forty minutes watching it. It triggered a few ideas that I’ll be writing about over the coming weeks and, today, I wanted to start by talking briefly about the idea of GitHub Organisations and introducing a couple of organisations that I’ve recently set up.
Olaf talks about GitHub Organisations as a way to ensure the continuity of your projects. And I think that’s a very important point. I’ve written a few times over recent years about the problems of getting fixes into CPAN modules when the maintainer has gone missing. This is also true of non-CPAN projects that members of the community might find useful. By setting up an organisation and inviting a few trusted people to join it, you can share the responsibility of looking after your projects. So if you lose interest or drift away, there’s a better chance that someone else will be able to take up the reins.
It’s actually a thought that I had before going to Toronto. A couple of months ago, I set up the Perl Tools Team organisation and transferred ownership of four of my repos.
- dashboard is the code that runs CPAN Dashboard
- planetperl has the code that drives Planet Perl (ok, actually, it contains the configuration for that site – most of the actual work is done by Perlanet – and see below for more about that)
- psc is used to generate my list of Perl Steering Council meetings – which should probably be updated
- perlsearch is the Perl Search Engine – which I haven’t looked at for years
There will, no doubt, be other repos that I’ll want to transfer over to this organisation in time. And, of course, if you have a tool that is used by the Perl community, I’ll be happy to add it to the list. Just get in touch and we can talk about it.
The other organisation (and I set this up just this morning) now owns all of the repos for my CPAN modules. I won’t be adding anybody else’s repos to this organisation, but if you send PRs to any of these projects (and I’m looking at you, Mohammad) then don’t be surprised if you get added to the organisation too! If you’ve watched my talk on GitHub Actions for Perl Development, then you might remember that I was developing a GitHub Workflow definition for releasing modules to CPAN. That’s still a work in progress, but now I’m thinking that I could add my PAUSE credentials to the GitHub secrets store for this organisation and the GitHub workflow could release the code to CPAN using my credentials without my input (but, obviously, I’m still considering the security implications of that – it would certainly only ever be available to me and a few trusted lieutenants).
This is still all very new and it will definitely develop in several directions over the coming months. But it feels like the a move in the right direction. After twenty years of CPAN releases, it feels like I’m turning my work into a “proper” project. And, hopefully, it can serve as a template that other people can follow. I’ll let you know how it goes.
So, what do you think? Is this the right model for CPAN development (and, also, Perl infrastructure development) moving forward? Would you be interested in joining either of these organisations? Do you have any tools that the Perl Tools Team could maintain for you?
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