Module Maintenance

shed their cloaks of silence and join the discussion. When this happens, you'll 

certainly be surprised at the depth of knowledge their surveillance has produced!

When you run a mailing list, you become the moderator. A moderator is 

responsible for maintaining a certain level of civility as well as keeping the dis 

cussion reasonably on topic. Being a good moderator takes practice, but you can 

learn a lot by joining other mailing lists and observing how the moderators deal 

with problems.

Establishing a New Mailing List

There are many free resources available for creating a new mailing list. Those listed 

in the following text are popular with CPAN module authors at present, but you 

should be aware that their services might have changed by the time you read this.

Once you've set up a mailing list, you can put the subscription information 

into your module documentation, since your users will hopefully look there when 

they have questions. CPAN also maintains a list of Perl related mailing lists. You 

can view the collection and register your new list at http://lists.cpan.org.

SourceForge

SourceForge is a site that provides a number of services, including free mailing 

lists, to open source developers using their homegrown, open source SourceForge 

software. To register a new SourceForge project, you must submit a description of 

your project. The process is similar to registering a namespace with CPAN, although 

SourceForge tends to act on registration requests more quickly and probably won't 

care if you've chosen a bad module name. You can find instructions by going to the 

SourceForge site at http://sourceforge.net.

Once you've registered a SourceForge project, you'll have access to a number 

of free services mailing lists, Web based discussion areas, CVS, Web site space, a 

public FTP site, bug tracking, task lists, news, and more! I'll be discussing some of 

these later, but it's definitely worth checking out to see what they've added since 

this book was published.

1

The SourceForge mailing lists are of the GNU Mailman

2

 variety and come with 

a Web archive set up automatically. Administration is performed through a Web 

interface where you can manage user subscription and mailing list policy.

1. SourceForge also markets a proprietary, commercial version of its site software for sale to 

large organizations. Depending on your politics, this might seem like an interesting 

possibility or a damning impurity. If you like the software but curse the wayward business 

model, the Free Software Foundation runs an entirely free version of the SourceForge 

software at http://savannah.gnu.org.

2. See http://www.list.org for details.

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