cpants whoring
I think the preferred term is “gaming,” but I don’t feel the need to whitewash it. I am a kwalitee monger.
I had a little Querylet-based report on the CPANTS data that I used to run to see how my distributions were doing; in generaly, I did quite well, and usually ranked in in the top five or ten authors. Mostly I lost out on “your code must be required by other people,” but that’s ok. I don’t expect many modules to require, say, Games::Nintendo::Mario. (It would be neat to see something use it, though, and might motivate me to get around to adding more data to it.)
Domm threw up a neat little front-end to the data, though, and I went back to see how I was doing. Overall, things looked fine. One or two dists of mine had a failed test that I had already fixed in Subversion. The big offender, though, was IPC::Run3.
I took over IPC::Run3 for work, while working with the Freeside billing system. Freeside is in many ways torturous, and I have thrown my hands up in the air many times because of it. One of those times, however, Freeside was not directly to blame. It used IPC::Run3 to run some external programs, and IPC::Run3 basically would not function under the debugger, because (if I recall correctly) it would, under certain conditions fail to import a module, a routine of which it was using as a bareword. So, it would (as Adam might say) “not be Perl under some conditions” and it would fail to compile.
It was sort of an irritating Heisenbug, and I really needed it to go away, because not being able to use the debugger was a serious problem for me. I asked whether the maintainer would update it, and ended up becoming the maintainer. (Dear Reader, are you interested in taking over? I’m done with it.)
I got my changes made and uploaded, and didn’t give a second through to the fact that it had broken POD, had no pod-coverage.t (I hate that Kwalitee test), and had no README. I’ve fixed all of these, although the POD coverage is pretty lousy. I’ve added a lot of blank stubs, but at least now all the methods are enumerated, if not always described.
I enjoy whoring for Kwalitee points. Maybe once I get a smoke system set up at work, I’ll look at getting a custom Kwalitee smoker, too.