If you haven’t been paying attention, which is likely given the small corner of the web I’m going to cover, you may have missed that BINGOS just hit 247 consecutive monthly uploads to CPAN1. This is noteworthy as it surpasses DROLSKY’s record set a while back.
That’s an upload to CPAN, once a month, for over twenty years. Once a month minimum I should say, as many of the authors on the board are uploading more frequently than that, some even daily.
My own monthly upload streak is a mere 149, or twelve and a half years, and really that’s only because I pay attention to the board. Once a month I will check it to remind myself to dig through my CPAN distributions for bugs, issues, and refactoring opportunities. This keeps their internals fresh in my mind for when reports from users or contributors come in.
The other authors on the board maintain an order of magnitude more distributions than I do, so are more likely to get a steady stream of reports from users. A stream that is turning into a torrent given the current place we find ourselves in the world of open source software.
And that’s where I start to worry a little. Here in the Perl world we’ve been quietly getting on with it since the first shouts of “nobody uses Perl anymore” going back almost as long as BINGOS’ streak. Quietly maintaining critical systems, billion dollar businesses, backwards compatibility, security patches, the occasional new feature, and yearly releases of the interpreter.
But that torrent of reports and issues is going to become a flood, and it’s not just the Perl ecosystem that is at risk.