Why Contribute to CPAN?

Chapter 1 - CPAN
by?Sam Tregar?
Apress ? 2002
Companion Web Site

CPAN thrives on the time and energy of volunteer programmers. You may be surprised that so many talented programmers are willing to work for free. Some CPAN programmers aren't actually donating their time—they're being paid to work on CPAN modules! This is certainly the minority, so let's look at some other reasons to join the CPAN community.

The Programmer's Incentive

For the lone programmer, contributing to CPAN is an excellent way to show the world your programming savvy. A programmer's resume is only an introduction; a smart employer wants proof. This can be hard to provide if all your work has been on closed-source projects. Open-source software is easy to evaluate—if you're good, employers will know it immediately. There's nothing quite like walking into an interview and having the programmer across the table suddenly realize he's been using your code for the past two months.

As software reaches higher levels of maturity and complexity, it is less and less realistic for a programmers to "go it alone." Today, conscientious and talented programmers first look to CPAN to provide a shortcut in their development process— and the best programmers contribute their work to CPAN, so that others may benefit. Tomorrow, it may even be considered a lack of professionalism to not start your software development efforts with a search through the CPAN repository.

By writing code for CPAN, you'll come into contact with other highly talented Perl programmers. This has been a great help to me personally—the many bug reports and suggestions I've received over the years have helped me improve my skills. With Perl, there's always more than one way to do it, and the more of them you master, the better.

The Business Incentive

Just as contributing to CPAN enhances a programmer's resume, so can a business benefit by association with popular Perl modules. Contributing your modules to CPAN can have the effect of establishing a standard around your practices. This makes answering the perennial question "Why aren't you using [Java, C++, ASP, PHP]?" much easier.

Some of the world's best programmers are open-source programmers. By actively supporting CPAN, you improve your hiring ability in the competitive market for Perl experts.

The Idealist's Incentive

For the idealist, contributing to CPAN is a good way to help save the world. CPAN is open to everyone—multinational corporations and tiny nonprofits eat at the same table. When you donate your work to CPAN, you ensure that your work will be available to anyone who needs it. Furthermore, by putting your work under a free software^[1] license you can help convince others to do the same; when they make changes to your code, they'll have to release them as free software.^[2]

CPAN History

The idea for CPAN, a single comprehensive archive of all things Perl, was first introduced in 1993 by Jared Rhine on the perl-packrats mailing list.^[3] The concept derived from the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN). At this point a number of large Perl archives were maintained on various FTP sites around the world. It was widely agreed that there would be many advantages to collecting all the available Perl materials in one hierarchy; however, the discussion died without producing a working version. In early 1995 Jarkko Hietaniemi resurrected the idea and began the monumental task of gathering and organizing the entire output of the Perl community into a single tree. Six months later he produced a working "private showing." This CPAN was essentially a sorted, classified version of the contents of every Perl archive on the Internet.

However, a critical piece was missing—a way for Perl authors to upload their work and have it automatically included in CPAN. Andreas Köenig came to the rescue by creating the Perl Author Upload SErver (PAUSE). PAUSE automatically builds the authors and modules-by directories that form the bulk of content on CPAN (86.5 percent at present).

With PAUSE in place, CPAN was nearly complete. After two months of testing and fixing with the help the perl-packrats, Jarkko released CPAN to the world as the Self-Appointed Master Librarian. The master server was set up at FUNet, where Jarkko worked as a systems administrator, which is where it remains today. From then on CPAN played a central role in the growth of the Perl community.

^[1]See http://www.fsf.org for more information about free software.

^[2]With some notable exceptions—see the "Choosing a License" section of Chapter 4 for more details.

^[3]he perl-packrats list, active from 1993 to 1996, was formed to discuss archiving Perl. Mailing list archives can be found at http://www.history.perl.org/packratsarch/.