CHAPTER 6

Module Maintenance

A

S SOON AS YOU RELEASE

your first module, you become the maintainer of your 

creation. A maintainer is the person in charge of the continued development of an 

open source project. As maintainer you'll receive bug reports, requests for new 

features, and contributions from other developers. It's your job to make decisions 

about the direction of the project and release new versions. This chapter will 

introduce some useful tools and strategies that can make your job as maintainer 

easier.

Growing a User Community

Every successful CPAN module is fed by an active user community. A developer 

working alone on a project with no other users has a shelf life of approximately 

three releases before moving on to more entertaining work. This can be artificially 

extended with various enticements revolutionary zeal, a weekly paycheck, caf 

feine, and so on but ultimately an active community is an absolute requirement 

for the continued life of a module.

An active user community confers a number of benefits. Users will employ 

your module in ways you won't have anticipated. This can be both entertaining 

and inspirational; as you and your users see new uses for your module, you'll nat 

urally come up with new features to make those uses more convenient. More 

fundamentally, users of your module will provide crucial testing for your module, 

identifying bugs that you would never have run into on your own.

Although having users is essential, it's not uncommon for a successful CPAN 

module to have a single author throughout its life. CPAN modules are by nature on 

the small side of open source endeavors and are usually within the capabilities of 

a single developer. However, a module whose only developer is also its only user 

will not evolve beyond its original conception; it may be a technical marvel, but 

without a user community it's doomed to a short and uneventful life.

Since user communities are so valuable, it's worthwhile to spend some time 

thinking about what can be done to create one and get the most out of it. More 

than half of the effort of building a user community is marketing. The effort starts 

with picking a good name for your module, and continues in how you promote 

your module, how you involve users, and how you make subsequent releases. Your 

users are your customers, and as we all know, customer service is job one.

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