Memoirs of a Roadie

Crash Course in Brain Surgery

Posted on 22nd March 2015

A Year of CPAN Uploads

On Thursday, 19th March 2015 I uploaded my 366th consecutive release to CPAN. To most that may well be "meh, whatever!", but for me it has been an exhausting yet fulfilling exercise. The last 60 days though, were undoubtably the hardest to achieve.

When I started this escapade, I did it without realising it. It was several days before I noticed that I had been commiting changes every day, just after the QA Hackahon in Lyon. What made it worse was that I then discovered that I had missed a day, and could have had a 3 day head-start beyond the 9 days I already had in hand. Just one day behind me was Neil Bowers, and the pair of us set about trying to reach 100 consecuive days. It took a while for us to get into the flow, but once we did, we were happily committing each day.

Both of us created our own automated upload scripts, to help us maintain the daily uploads. This was partly to ensure we didn't forget, but also allowed us to be away for a day or two and still know that we would be able to upload something. In my case I had worried I would miss out when I went on holiday to Cornwall, but thankfully the apartment had wifi installed, and I was able to manage my releases and commits every morning before we left to explore for the day.

I mostly worked at weekends and stocked up on releases, sometimes with around 10 days prepared in advance. Most of the changes centred around bug fixes, documentaion updates and test suite updates, but after a short while, we both started looking at our CPANTS ratings and other metrics around what makes a good packaged release. We both created quests on QuestHub, and ticked off the achievements as we went. There were plenty of new features along the way too, as well as some new modules and distributions, as we both wanted to avoid making only minor tweaks, just for the sake of releasing something. I even adopted around 10 distributions from others, who had either moved on to other things or sadly passed away, and brought them all up to date.

Sadly, Neil wasn't able to sustain the momentum, and had to bail out after 111 consecutive uploads. Thankfully, I still had plenty of fixes and updates to work through, so I was hopeful I could keep going for a little while longer at least.

One major change that happened during 2014, was to the CPANTS analysis code. Kenichi Ishigaki updated the META file evaluations to employ a stricter rendition of the META Specification, which meant the license field in most of my distributions on CPAN now failed. As a consequence this gave me around 80 distributions that needed a release. On top of this, I committed myself to releasing 12 new distribuions, one each month, for a year, beginning March 2014. Although I've now completed the release of the 12 distributions, I have yet to complete all the blog posts, so that quest is still incomplete.

I made a lot of changes to Labyrinth (my website management framework) and the various ISBN scrapers I had written, so these formed the bedrock of my releases. Without these I probably wouldn't have been able to make 100 consecutive releases, and definitely not for a full year. But here I am 366+ days later and still have releases yet to do. Most of the releases from me in the future will centre around Labyrinth and CPAN Testers, but as both require quite in depth work, it's unlikely you'll see such a frequent release schedule. I expect I'll be able to get at least one released a week, to maintain and extend my current 157 week stretch, but sustaining a daily release is going to be a struggle.

Having set the bar, Mohammad S Anwar (MANWAR) and Michal Špaček (SKIM) have now entered the race, and Mohammad has said he wants to beat my record. Both are just over 200 days behind, and judging from my experience, they are going to find it tricky once they hit around 250, unless they have plenty of plans for releases by then. After 100, I had high hopes of reaching 200, however I wasn't so sure I would make 300. After 300, it really was much tougher to think of what to release. Occasionally, I would be working on a test suite and bug fixes would suggest themselves, but mostly it was about working through the CPAN Testers reports. Although, I do have to thank the various book sites too, for updating their sites, which in turn meant I had several updates I could make to the scrapers.

I note that Mohammad and Michal both are sharing releases against the Map-Tube variants, which may keep them going for a while, but eventually they do need to think about other distributions. Both have plenty of other distributions in their repetoire, so it's entirely possible for them both to overtake me, but I suspect it will be a good while before anyone else attempts to tackle this particular escapade. I wish then both well on their respective journies, but at least I am safe in the knowledge I was the first to break 1 year of daily consecutive CPAN uploads. Don't think I'll be trying it again though :)

A Celebration

Posted on 11th August 2014

August the 16th is CPAN Day. Its the day that is marked as the first upload to CPAN. CPAN came into existence in July/August 1995, but on August 16th 1995 Andreas König made the first true upload to the archive. And so began a growth that is continuing and growing to this day. Jumping ahead to several weeks ago, Neil Bowers decided to make a big deal about this day. After all we celebrate Perl's birthday, why not celebrate CPAN too.

Neil has been posting several ideas for how you can improve distributions on CPAN, with the aim of making several releases on CPAN Day. With that aim in mind, Neil posted some stats and graphs to show what has happened on CPAN Day in previous years. I did some data mining and came up with a page to help monitor CPAN Day. I sent the link to Neil, who then came up with several suggestions. Trying to create the graphs proved interesting, and thanks to everyone on Twitter who sent me various links to help out.

The page has expanded slightly and includes the neoCPANisms, which Neil has been monitoring. NeoCPANism being the number of new distributions that have never been uploaded to CPAN before. It will be interesting to see how many new distributions get released on CPAN Day, as the biggest day of new release was nearly 2 years ago, with 41 new distributions release on the same day.

The page is now created in real time (well every 5 minutes) so you can see how we're progressing throughout the day. The page is now available at stats.cpantesters.org/uploads.html. You can watch progress for each day now, not just CPAN Day, but let's see if we can reach the suggested target on Saturday :)