There was much excitement in the Ruby world last week when Benjamin Fleischer laid out a proposal for dealing with orphaned Ruby Gems. He rightfully pointed out that there needed to be a way in which someone new could take over a project so it doesn’t become abandoned.

He recommends a RubyGems Adoption Center, wherein projects might be listed by their owner as being up for adoption, amongst other happenings that might fit in there.

It’s a good idea. When an owner effectively abandons a gem without naming a successor, it’s a loss of modern code to the community. This system would put an infrastructure in place for outgoing owners to find their replacements.

In fact, this is such a good idea that the Perl community has already done it. Of course. Here’s some info on it from the CPAN FAQ:

The easiest way to take over a module is to have the current module maintainer either make you a co-maintainer or transfer the module to you. If you can’t reach the author for some reason (e.g. email bounces), the PAUSE admins at modules@perl.org can help. The PAUSE admins treat each case individually. Please make sure you have tried all of the above ways of getting in contact with the author before going this way!

PAUSE, by the way, is the Perl Authors Upload Server, a place where prospective CPAN authors can go to be registered and learn how the CPAN works.

Unrelated, but cool: PrePan.org is a site set up for new CPAN contributors to post their code in public for review by the community. Is that just GitHub for every other language? Or is this the next feature some other language’s module code base will copy?

This has been yet another installment in an on-going series known as “Perl did that first, too.”

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