Support meta field for copying permissions from another module

[haarg]

x_authority allows you to specify another author to be given first-come permissions on new modules you upload in a given dist. This allows the authority user to manage all of the permissions for a dist. It isn't sufficient for cabal maintained dists though, because only the uploader and the designated authority are given permissions, not the other co-maints.

What would work better would be a way to specify a module to copy permissions from. This would include the first-come permissions, as well as any co-maint permissions. This is something that could be done manually by the uploader (assuming x_authority wasn't set) but can take a lot of time.

Maybe x_copy_permissions => "Module::Name"?

[dagolden]

Now that distribution names are linked to module name permissions anyway, what if x_authority just copied the permissions from the module name matching the distribution name to any new modules rather than adding another "x_" field?

[karenetheridge]

Yes, it's just my distributions, but: http://grep.cpan.me/?q=x_permissions_from

what if x_authority just copied the permissions from the module name matching the distribution name to any new modules rather than adding another "x_" field?

By default? I expect we'd have to exempt the distributions that are already grandfathered due to not having a module that matched the distribution name.

[haarg]

It seems confusing if setting x_authority: "cpan:HAARG" started copying a bunch of other permissions. Would we just be ignoring the value entirely?

[karenetheridge]

looks like I never mentioned on here that I've been adding this metadata to all my released distributions for quite a while, via: https://metacpan.org/pod/Dist::Zilla::Plugin::AuthorityFromModule (see the MOTIVATION section of pod for more relating to this ticket).

[andk]

Splendid motivation section, thanks for that. What is not so beautiful: 50 people x 50 modules => 2500 permissions. From a recent discussion with RJBS it seems a little known fact that pause supported groups for ages, we just used the term mailing lists at that time: https://pause.perl.org/pause/authenquery?ACTION=show_ml_repr. The interface was always ugly and probably is the reason it never took off, but at least it was O(N).

[haarg]

That interface also appears to only be available to PAUSE admins.

Is having 2500 permissions a significant problem somewhere? And for most dists there wouldn't be anywhere near that many.

[karenetheridge]

The metadata sketched out in this ticket doesn't make the permissions db any larger than it is today -- it simply attempts to address the problem of inconsistent permissions arising on a distribution, without having to involve the PAUSE admins in fixing things manually.

I did a quick analysis of the permissions db, to see the distribution between modules and number of maintainers:

# number of maintainers => matching modules
$VAR1 = {
          '01' => 151379,
          '02' => 28799,
          '03' => 6511,
          '04' => 7452,
          '05' => 3322,
          '06' => 1672,
          '07' => 1755,
          '08' => 643,
          '09' => 228,
          '10' => 252,
          '11' => 275,
          '12' => 104,
          '13' => 87,
          '14' => 109,
          '15' => 24,
          '16' => 42,
          '17' => 35,
          '18' => 10,
          '19' => 82,
          '20' => 193,
          '21' => 49,
          '22' => 62,
          '23' => 53,
          '24' => 44,
          '25' => 34,
          '26' => 12,
          '27' => 3,
          '28' => 2,
          '29' => 3,
          '31' => 3,
          '32' => 1,
          '33' => 1,
          '37' => 2
        };

The code:

use strict;
use warnings;

# read ~/.cpanm/06perms.txt from STDIN and place modules in buckets for how many maintainers each has:

my %modules; # module => authors count

while (my $line = <>) {
    chomp($line);
    next if $line =~ /\s/;
    my ($module, $author, $perm) = split(/,/, $line, 3);
    next if not $module;

    ++$modules{$module};
}

my %author_count;

foreach my $module (keys %modules) {
    ++$author_count{ sprintf('%02d', $modules{$module}) };
}

use Data::Dumper;
local $Data::Dumper::Sortkeys = 1;
print Dumper(\%author_count);