I already aluded to the fact in a few posts already, but just to make it a wee bit more public: a few weeks ago, someone had a lapse of common sense and knighted me Maintainer of DBD::Oracle.

mouahahaha

\*ahem\* I mean, I'm honored to be allowed to at the wheel of what is one of the most venerable battleships of the CPAN armada, and hereby swear to serve her at the best of my abilities.

While I’m not exactly a database expert, and my knowledge of OCI could only be charitably defined as nascent, I have the good luck of being embedded smack in the middle of a wicked hive of SQL and db wizardry, and some of the sharpest blades in the armory are actually acutely keen to contribute to the project. In consequence, my strategy for the time being will mostly for me to man the administrative part of the maintenance (bug triage, release grooming, repository overseeing — y’know, all the fun stuff), and let better minds take care of the real hard parts.

Join the fun!

Of course, one can never have too many minds, so if you want to join the fun, you are quite welcome to. “How?”, you ask? Oh, there are quite a few ways:

• Mailing lists. dbi-dev is the core mailing list for DBI development. However, since quite a few of the new potential contributors will need coaching in the ways of the CPAN, I also created a dbd-oracle. Expect the deep, interesting discussions to happen on the former list, and the nitty-gritty day-to-day details to be ironed out on the latter.

• Bugs. Bugs are recorded on rt.cpan.org. I’ve also made a copy of the list using GitHub Issues, so that I could sort bugs by architecture, versions and whatnots. Ever feel bored? Pick a bug that is supposed to affect your architecture, try to reproduce it, and have a go at fixing it.

• Repositories. The official repository is still at svn.perl.org. There is also a GitHub clone. You want to write a patch? Checkout the svn repo and push the patch via RT, or fork the GitHub repo and go wild.

Sneak Preview

One of the things I really, really want to do is to make DBD::Oracle release cycle more frequent and consistent — I’m aiming for monthly milestones and… we’ll see how well it goes.

There’s already a developer version of the next version on CPAN. As soon as one lone but

nasty bug is squished, it'll be promoted to a bona fide release.

And for the near future? I plan for cleaning up the Makefile.PL, tidying the 30-some bugs lingering in the RT queue, and corrupting lotsa smart minds to do my bidding.

Wish me luck. :-)