Add support for extra information about PAUSE account holders

[book]

The idea is that this information can then be used by tools (MetaCPAN, neilb's adoption list, etc.) for some useful purpose.

The "tags" I'm currently thinking about are:

• distinguish between individual and group (e.g. RATL, JUNIPER and SIXAPART are companies, as are CTI, CONNECTED, DATABUILT, DDG, FASTLY, and many others)
• indicate when an author has passed away (currently only SCHOP, AMORETTE , SPOON, NI-S have a "PAUSE Custodial Account" note in the name, but there are others. I also have no idea what the status of SAVA is.)

I have no idea what the technical solution can be. The special ADOPTME trick (make this account a co-main to indicate adoptability) works for modules, but won't for authors.

Obviously, the whole point of this is to make the information easy to query, possibly via the text files already part of CPAN. (Or maybe a new file?)

[dagolden]

I'm not sure why this is important, nor do I think at least the first part is realistic. We (meaning I) don't screen out companies. Many people register names and use them for company uploads. Unless someone actively says "This is a company account" or unless the name is identifiable to a company we have no way of knowing. If companies want to self-identify, then fine, but I'm not sure how that accomplishes whatever goals you have for distinguishing companies from individuals.

For "company" and "deceased" authors, I suppose fields could be added to the user information table and form and people (or PAUSE admins) could check them off.

But overall, I'm somewhat negative on these ideas. At least, it's not where I would devote PAUSE development time. If someone really wanted to do the work, I wouldn't say no.

David

[book]

Actually, I thought of the "deceased" category first, when I noticed a few names in the list of PAUSE account that I knew were not with us any more but didn't have the "PAUSE Custodial Account" note. The only use case I had in mind was in combination with neilb's [http://neilb.org/adoption/](adoption list).

Since I was proposing on adding some metadata, I looked for other possibly useful metada, and came up with company (I vaguely recall non-individual accounts being discouraged, but I probably read that on the PAUSE web site a long time ago).

Given that the idea doesn't fly with you, maybe the immediate solution to improve the adoption list is to send a list of deceased authors to modules@perl.org, and request that ADOPTME becomes a co-maint of all of their distributions.

[dagolden]

Given that the idea doesn't fly with you, maybe the immediate solution to improve the adoption list is to send a list of deceased authors to modules@perl.org, and request that ADOPTME becomes a co-maint of all of their distributions.

That should happen anyway, but ADOPTME becomes primary maintainer of modules for deceased authors.

[neilb]

The users table in PAUSE's db has the column:

`ustatus` enum('unused','active','delete','nologin') NOT NULL DEFAULT 'unused'

I wonder if it would be helpful / useful to add 'deceased' to the enumeration? I know there isn't really an interface to this, but I use (maybe abuse would be the right word?) moddump.current for a number of purposes now :-)

[book]

Also, it seems the format of the name and the email address are not consistent (examples from http://www.cpan.org/authors/00whois.html):

• forwarded to modules@perl.org:

  SCHOP     Ariel Brosh (PAUSE Custodial Account) <modules@perl.org>
  AMORETTE  Hojung Youn  (PAUSE Custodial Account) <modules@perl.org>
  SPOON     Iain Truskett (PAUSE Custodial Account) <modules@perl.org>

• forwarded to someone else:

  RKOBES    Randy Kobes (contact brian d foy) <bdfoy@cpan.org>

• not forwarded:

  NI-S      Nick Ing-Simmons (PAUSE Custodial Account) <ni-s@cpan.org>

• no address:

  SAVA      PAUSE Custodial Account <>

I suppose there is no procedure for handling such a sad and unexpected event (and thankfully rare, too), and that the practices have evolved over time.