There is an adoption process for truly inactive maintainers: http://neilb.org/2013/07/24/adopt-a-module.html - you can also often get somewhere by just asking the current maintainer nicely by email. The timeliness of the process in the event of a non-repsonsive maintainer depends on luck and how much depends on the module. In the end it doesn't matter if a group or a person adopts it - someone still has to decide to do the work.
Re:The Future of Perl
by thatwasunusual on Thursday March 25, 2021 @04:42PM
(#26585131)
> There is an adoption process [...]
This is good, but to me it's too tedious. I can't wait a month for something to happen. The solution so far has been to fire up a Pinto server and serve "home-made-patched" versions of modules, which only benefits myself, not the community.
> [...] you can also often get somewhere by just asking the current maintainer nicely by email.
What could be more intrusive than creating a pull request or git issue? An email.
IMO, that's a good thing. Imagine having only one choice at any layer in society (to make my example extreme): one type of house, one type of car, one type of computer, on type of OS, one type of file system, one type of programming language etc.
> Want OO? Use Moose, or Moo, or Mouse or whatever else.
This is true; no built-in "proper" OO has been a pain for Perl for a long time. However, I've used to love Mouse (like Moose, but a trillion times faster), and I've never had any problems with it.
There are plans to inject proper OO into Perl, though.[1]
> Then hope that the one you picked will continue to be maintained.
This is my biggest problem. I wish there was a "system" of sorts that let _groups of people_ adopt/take over a Perl module and Just Fix It (tm). Having only one person take over a module/package isn't good enough; there must be more people involved in fixing things.
One good example is Crypt::Curve25519[2] which could/should have been fixed years ago, but because the maintainer is inactive, it won't happen.
And now we're back to where we started: because things doesn't get fixed, people create their own versions of CPAN packages just for the F[ix|uck] of it.
[1] https://dev.to/ovid/bringing-modern-oo-to-perl-51ak
[2] https://metacpan.org/pod/Crypt::Curve25519