History Of Modern (part I)

Posted on 23rd February 2014

Neil Bowers recently unleashed CPAN::ReleaseHistory on the world. Internally the distribution uses the a BACKPAN Index, which records every release to CPAN. I was already interested in this kind of representation, as I wanted to add a similar metric on each Author page of the CPAN Testers Reports website, but hadn't got around to it. Neil then posted about the script included in the distribution, cpan-release-counts in an interesting post; What's your CPAN release history?.

After a quick download, I ran the following for myself:

barbie@kmfdm:~$ cpan-release-counts --char = --width 30 --user barbie
 2003 ( 12) ==
 2004 ( 26) =====
 2005 ( 80) ===============
 2006 (  6) =
 2007 ( 59) ===========
 2008 ( 62) ===========
 2009 (122) =======================
 2010 (148) ============================
 2011 ( 89) =================
 2012 (156) ==============================
 2013 (123) =======================
 2014 ( 11) ==

So my most prolific year was in 2012. I'll have to see if I can change that this year. However, it does give a nice yearly snapshot of my releases.

As it turns out, for CPAN Testers I don't need the BACKPAN index, as I already generate and maintain an 'uploads' table within the 'cpanstats' database. I do need to write the code to add this metric to the Author pages. Thanks to Neil's script though, he has given me a starting point. Being able to see the releases for yourself (or a particular Author) is quite cool, so I may adapt that to make any such matrix more dynamic. It might also be worth adding a more generic metric for all of CPAN to the CPAN Testers Statistics website. Either way, I now have two more things to add to my list of projects for the QA Hackathon next month. Neil will be there too, so I hope he can give me even more ideas, while I'm there ;)

File Under: hackathon / opensource / perl
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