Re: Legacy scripts

On Mon, Sep 20, 1999 at 03:44:25PM -0400, [email protected] wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 20, 1999 at 09:35:01AM -0400, Rich Bowen wrote:
> > 
> > I think that it would be a worthwhile exercise to go through all of them
> > and figure out which ones were worth keeping, and move them to the main
> > scripts archive. And the ones that were deemed not worth keeping,
> > perhaps it would be worthwhile to demonstrate an alternative way of
> > doing the same thing, and present the old way and the new way together
> > somehow, with some commentary of why the old way seemed like a good idea
> > at the time - apparently, mostly because we were still using Perl 4 at
> > the time.
> 
> 
> While can I see and appreciate the intention, isn't this a slippery
> slope? Do we want a committee that's going to judge which scripts
> are "good enough" to be part of the archive, and which aren't?

    I see it a little bit differently.  I suggest that a script is
good enough if somebody, either the original author or a new volunteer,
takes responsibility for sponsoring it (meaning it lives in their PAUSE
directory).

    Most content on CPAN has _some_ kind of support structure behind it,
at the very least the email address of PAUSE author.  Some of the legacy
scripts have no attribution, or just an expired email address in a
comment.  I suggest that anything on CPAN that has this sort of `dead
air' behind it is valueless, or of negative value.  IMHO.  :^)

> The modules section of CPAN isn't peer reviewed either, everyone can put
> anything he/she wants there. I think that the advantages of that outweigth
> the disadvantages. I think the same should hold for scripts.

    I agree with you entirely on this point.

> Now, it doesn't hurt to point out that certain scripts were written 
> X years ago, when there were no (or less) modules; that they were written
> for older versions of Perl, and that there might be CPAN modules that do
> the work as well.

    Peace,
* Kurt Starsinic ([email protected]) --------- Technical Specialist *
|       `People keep pretending they can make things deeply                 |
|        hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't.        |
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