CPAN has been around for more than 30 years.

That means something interesting has started to happen.

Some modules are still useful.

Some are still deeply embedded in production systems.

Some sit underneath dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other distributions.

But the people who originally maintained them may have moved on.

The code remains.

The dependency remains.

The maintenance responsibility does not automatically move with it.

That is the problem I started CPAN Rescue to explore.

https://cpan-rescue.com

At first, the idea was simple:

Find useful CPAN distributions that are abandoned or under-maintained, help repair them, and adopt them when appropriate.

After doing the work, I realized that rescuing modules is not the real problem.

The harder problem is this:

How do we create the next generation of open-source maintainers?

Software can outlive its maintainers

A library does not need frequent releases to be valuable.

Sometimes the opposite is true.

A module may be ten or fifteen years…