OpenSource++ - The other side

2013-09-04
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Besides sending patches there is another side to open source: Receiving contributions.

Some time ago I've maintained CPANTS. For this I've written Module::ExtractUse. I've passed on CPANTS maintainer-ship on to Kenichi Ishigaki, but somehow I'm still stuck with maintaining Module::ExtractUse. Even though most code is now written by others.

To make things very easy for me, I've added Kenichi Ishigaki as a collaborator to the github repo. So any changes he does can be committed right into the repo, without the whole pull-request-merge-dance (which is still finer than getting patches by email..).

So my only job is to react to the mails Kenichi sends from time to time and push a new release (even though Kenichi has the CO-MAINT rights on pause). Thanks to Dist::Zilla this is ridiculously easy:

Bump the version number and update the CHANGES file (there are Dist::Zilla plugins for this, but I prefer to do it by hand)
dzil test
dzil build
log in to PAUSE
upload the new tarball.
Done!

And the moral of it is

Make it easy for others to contribute!

If they do, try to react fast (something I'm rather bad at, considering the two weeks between Kenichis last request to release a new version and me actually doing it a few minutes ago...)