I'm going to run another CPAN Pull Request Challenge in 2016, but with a few differences from the 2015 challenge. Here I'll outline the challenge and the differences.

On the 1st day of each month I'll email participants a CPAN distribution, and they'll have one month to submit a Pull Request (PR). The following month, I'll assign a new distribution to everyone who has completed the previous month.

Differences from 2015's challenge:

I'll only assign distributions that were last released by someone who has explicitly opted in (2015 was an opt out model).

I'm hoping to only assign distributions that are somewhere on the CPAN River. Ie they have one or more downstream dependents.

At the moment participation is only open to people I've invited. Initially I invited everyone who completed at least two assignments in 2015.

So far I've emailed 824 CPAN authors, asking if they're happy for one or more of their CPAN distributions to be assigned. These were distributions that (a) have a github repo, and (b) have one or more downstream dependents. At the moment 139 authors have agreed, but I'm hoping that I'll get a surge of positive replies after the Christmas break. That's why it's invite-only at the moment.

I'm open to bribery though, if you really want to take part. If you set up a repeating annual donation to the CPAN Testers fund for £20 or more, then I'll sign you up (once I've had confirmation from Mark Keating of your donation).

Why opt-in on authors?

One of the most discouraging aspects for 2015 participants was getting no response from authors, either after sending email, or submitting a PR.

Hopefully, making it opt-in will make the authors of assigned dists more likely to engage with participants, resulting in happier participants, and more and higher-quality PRs.

My challenge

I'm not taking part myself this year. My challenge is to find 12 or more on-river distributions that have a github repo, but where the github repo isn't listed in the dist's metadata ( META.yml and/or META.json ). I'll submit a PR to fix that.

If there aren't at least 12 such dists (I'm pretty sure there will be), then I'll try and get some authors to create github repos!

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