1. Balancing Sharing And Selshness The CPAN Way

2. or

3. The Used-ocracy

4. or

5. Crap Is Gold

6. Hi I'm Michael Schwern I went to CMU I failed.

7. Perl

8. Perl is part of Unix

9. Perl has to work!

10. Comprehensive Perl Archive Network

11. CPAN

12. CPAN is half of Perl

13. CPAN breaks, Perl breaks

14. CPAN has to work!

15. CPAN is 90% crap 90% of everything is crap (present company excluded) That's ok because ideally you never nd it And nobody uses it (for long)

16. Only 10% gets used That 10% is really good

17. Isn't that inefcient? Yes... ...but maybe it's the least inefficient in the long run

18. Oslo QA Hackathon Lots of arguments and productivity Lots of things that have been festering for years resolved

19. Improving CPAN Improving Perl testing

20. Why Us? Why this bunch of people? Why not somebody else?

21. Testing experts? Nope

22. Fancy degrees? Nope

23. Big companies? Nope

24. Why Us? Why this bunch of people? Why not somebody else?

25. We do

26. People use People use our stuff

27. Selected by use

28. Merit-ocracy? We're not there because we wrote the quot;bestquot; thing What is the quot;bestquot;? How do you select what is the quot;bestquot;?

29. Do-ocracy? We're not there just because we do the work. 90% of CPAN is crap They did, but they're not selected.

30. Used-ocracy We're there because our stuff gets used. That's it Even if it's internals are crap, it's useful

31. Selected by use

32. Not by poll

33. Not by vote

34. Not by asking

35. Not by what people want

36. By what people need Not just what they think or say they need But by what they actually need

37. Use illustrates need

38. Use is measurable Clearly measurable Downloads, phone homes, quot;popularity contestquot; Mailing list activity, robust communities Forks, patches...

39. Select By Use A healthy system selects by use

40. CPAN is a Used-ocracy The users select what is important.

41. Use is evolutionary

42. Pave the cow paths We were in Oslo to pave the cow paths

43. Pave the wagon trails

44. Descriptive Describing More formally Because the community had grown too large for conventions Word-of-mouth only goes so far Spread best practice

45. English dictionaries are primarily descriptive

46. Proscriptive Every time we proscribed something Came up with our own best practices Strayed off the cow paths It all went to hell We didn't have enough information Caused implementation problems

47. Proscribe the potentially bad

48. Proscribe the potentially good also proscribe the good

49. Proscribing change Nobody will ever want to do it this way Proscription backs you into a corner Proscription bets everything

50. My prediction for the future?

51. YOU'RE WRONG I'll win So many people make so many predictions over so much time Odds are they're wrong

52. Be Descriptive Describe only as much as you need Leave the rest open as a user playground Even the bad things They provide wedges to do amazing things years later

53. Descriptive embraces change The world will change Technologies change People change Safe bet Have a system that works with change

54. Can't predict change In the long term Who could have predicted the web? NCSA Mosaic 15 years ago in 1993 So you can't control it

55. NCSA Mosaic is 15 years old (The stable releases) That was the beginning of the modern web. The rst graphical web browser.

56. Perl 5 is 15 years old Developed before the web took off

57. Perl is 20 years old

58. CPAN is 12 years old And for much of that time it wasn't intensely used. Not like it is now.

59. Perl predated the web Perl did not predict the web Perl became THE web language

60. Linux is 17 years old

61. Unix predated it Unix became THE web server Who had trouble?

62. Microsoft w/Win 95 and 98 And Windows 95 came *after* Mosaic

63. Controlling change is death or at least really painful in Microsoft's case

64. Descriptive embraces chaos

65. 90% is crap Taking a big crap is healthy

66. One man's crap Is another man's gold

67. App::Asciio For example

68. App::Asciio - Plain ASCII diagram | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | v | v | v | v v v ______ _____ / _ __ __/ __` L ____ ___ /_/_ / -----> __ /',__ /'___/ / -----> / /__, `/ __/ _ _ _/____/ ____ _ _ _____ /_//_//___/ /____/ /_//_//_____/ | | | | | | | | | | | v | | | v | | | v | | | v | | v v v (_/) (O.o) ASCII world domination is near! (> ....................................... | | .....'----------'........................................................ | | ......................................................................... | | ...................----------------..---------------..................... | | ..................| ASCII > || thin_box |.................... | | ..................| Rules line > || text |.................... | | ..................| Load || wirl_arrow |.................... | grid------------->..........| Save || arrow |.----------......... | | ..................| Export > || box > || star_box |........ | | ..................'----------------'| Rulers > |'----------'........ | | ...........................^........| Misc > |.................... | | ...........................|........| T_star |.................... | | ...........................|........'---------------'.................... | | ...........................|............................................. | | ...........................|............................................. | | ...........................|............................................. | | ...........................|............................................. | | ...........................|............................................. | | ...........................|............................................. | '----------------------------|----------------------------------------------' | context menu

70. .---. .---. .---. .---. .---. .---. OS API '---' '---' '---' '---' '---' '---' | | | | | | v v | v | v .------------. | .-----------. | .-----. | Filesystem | | | Scheduler | | | MMU | '------------' | '-----------' | '-----' | | | | v | | v .----. | | .---------. | IO |