CHAPTER 6
Module Maintenance
A
S SOON AS YOU RELEASE
your first module, you become the maintainer of your 
creation. A maintainer is the person in charge of the continued development of an 
open source project. As maintainer you'll receive bug reports, requests for new 
features, and contributions from other developers. It's your job to make decisions 
about the direction of the project and release new versions. This chapter will 
introduce some useful tools and strategies that can make your job as maintainer 
easier.
Growing a User Community
Every successful CPAN module is fed by an active user community. A developer 
working alone on a project with no other users has a shelf life of approximately 
three releases before moving on to more entertaining work. This can be artificially 
extended with various enticements revolutionary zeal, a weekly paycheck, caf 
feine, and so on but ultimately an active community is an absolute requirement 
for the continued life of a module.
An active user community confers a number of benefits. Users will employ 
your module in ways you won't have anticipated. This can be both entertaining 
and inspirational; as you and your users see new uses for your module, you'll nat 
urally come up with new features to make those uses more convenient. More 
fundamentally, users of your module will provide crucial testing for your module, 
identifying bugs that you would never have run into on your own.
Although having users is essential, it's not uncommon for a successful CPAN 
module to have a single author throughout its life. CPAN modules are by nature on 
the small side of open source endeavors and are usually within the capabilities of 
a single developer. However, a module whose only developer is also its only user 
will not evolve beyond its original conception; it may be a technical marvel, but 
without a user community it's doomed to a short and uneventful life.
Since user communities are so valuable, it's worthwhile to spend some time 
thinking about what can be done to create one and get the most out of it. More 
than half of the effort of building a user community is marketing. The effort starts 
with picking a good name for your module, and continues in how you promote 
your module, how you involve users, and how you make subsequent releases. Your 
users are your customers, and as we all know, customer service is job one.
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