Bitrot.
The curse of being a prolific publisher is a long list of once-cherished, now-neglected modules.
Earlier this week, I got a depressing Github notification. The author of a pull request who has politely pestered me for a while to review his PR, added this comment:
Ouch!
Sadly, after taking time to review the PR, I actually decided it wasn’t a great fit and politely (I hope), rejected it. And then I felt even WORSE, because I’d made someone wait around a year for me to say “no”.
Much like my weight hitting a local maxima on the scale, goading me to rededicate myself to healthier eating [dear startups, enough with the constant junk food, already!], this PR felt like a low point in my open-source maintenance.
And, so, just like I now have an app to show me a dashboard of my food consumption, I decided I needed a birds eye view of what I’d been ignoring on Github.
Here, paraphrased, is my “conversation” with Github.
Me: Github, show me a dashboard! GH: Here's a feed of events on repos you watch Me: No, I want a dashboard. GH: Here's a list of issues created, assigned or mentioning you. Me: No, I want a dashboard. Maybe I need an organization view. [my CPAN repos are in an organization] GH: Here's a feed of events on repos in the organization. Me: No, I want a dashboard of issues. GH: Here's a list of issues for repos in the organization. Me: Uh, can you summarize that? GH: No. Me: Github, you suck. But you have an API. Time to bust out some Perl.
So I wrote my own github-dashboard program, using Net::GitHub. (Really, I adapted it from other Net::GitHub programs I already use.) I keep my Github user id and API token in my .gitconfig, so the program pulls my credentials from there.
Below, you can see my Github dashboard of neglect (top 40 only!). The three columns of numbers are (respectively) PRs, non-wishlist issues and wishlist issues. (Wishlist items are identified either by label or by “wishlist” in the title.)
$ ./github-dashboard | head -40
Capture-Tiny 3 18 0
Meerkat 2 8 0
getopt-lucid 2 1 0
Path-Tiny 1 21 0
HTTP-Tiny-UA 1 5 0
Path-Iterator-Rule 1 5 0
Dist-Zilla-Plugin-BumpVersionAfterRelease 1 3 2
Metabase-Fact 1 3 0
dist-zilla-plugin-osprereqs 1 2 0
Dist-Zilla-Plugin-Test-ReportPrereqs 1 2 0
ToolSet 1 2 0
Dist-Zilla-Plugin-Meta-Contributors 1 1 0
Dist-Zilla-Plugin-MakeMaker-Highlander 1 0 0
Task-CPAN-Reporter 1 0 0
IO-CaptureOutput 0 7 0
pantry 0 7 2
TAP-Harness-Restricted 0 4 0
class-insideout 0 3 0
Hash-Ordered 0 3 0
Log-Any 0 3 4
perl-chef 0 3 0
Term-Title 0 3 0
Test-DiagINC 0 3 0
Acme-require-case 0 2 0
Class-Tiny 0 2 0
Data-Fake 0 2 2
dist-zilla-plugin-twitter 0 2 0
Log-Any-Adapter-Log4perl 0 2 0
math-random-oo 0 2 0
superclass 0 2 0
Test-Roo 0 2 0
universal-new 0 2 0
zzz-rt-to-github 0 2 0
app-ylastic-costagent 0 1 0
Dancer-Session-Cookie 0 1 0
Dist-Zilla-Plugin-CheckExtraTests 0 1 0
Dist-Zilla-Plugin-InsertCopyright 0 1 0
Dist-Zilla-Plugin-ReleaseStatus-FromVersion 0 1 0
File-chdir 0 1 0
File-pushd 0 1 0
Now, when I set aside maintenance time, I know where to work.