September 14, 2004
Registering namespaces on CPAN: What's the point?
With some help from Randal Schwartz Reformed Perl is now available on CPAN.
Now I wonder if I'm supposed to fight for the namespace that the Reformed Perl's modules occupy. The PAUSE FAQ is a little vague about it, and only promises some nasty things that might happen to you if you skip this step.
Countless modules of high quality are occupying CPAN without a namespace registration. Which doesn't come as a surprise, as the benefits of registration seem few: Inclusion in the big module list that hasn't been updated for more than two years big module list, and an entry in CPAN's category tree which no one uses anymore. When you're looking for a module these days, you simply search for it.
For the sake of form I submitted a request for registration of the reform namespace, but was immediately asked to discuss my proposal on the perl5-porters list beforehand. I can understand the request, but should I really invest the time given that claiming a rootlevel namespace in the CPAN hierarchy is not going to get me much love?
Update: I was wrong, there actually is an actively maintained module list on CPAN. Still, does anyone find their packages this way?
Comments
This has been the topic of a lot of moderately heated debate on the module-authors list [ http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=module-authors ]. Most people are in the don't-care-about-it camp.
Posted by Aristotle Pagaltzis (#)
