I am not sure how constructive posts like these are. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.<p>That said, the longer I code, the more borrowing from the crufty old langiage/system/community/technology I see in the "shiny new thing", even if many folks slam the old entity.
Condescending tone aside, what I read as being proposed for Ruby isn't the same as what is being shown for Perl.<p>In Perl, a dev says "Huh, I don't think this is being maintained properly", and then proceeds to contact the original author, and failing that, a set of admins.<p>The Ruby proposal, on top of that, allows a dev who is abandoning a project to mark it as such, and that then is individually findable or noticeable. This is actually a rather more interesting approach, as it means those downstream know when a library they're using is being abandoned, and can decide -immediately- what to do about it, from switching to another library, up to and including taking ownership of the existing one. The community can have a proactive notification of abandonment, if you will.
While I agree with a majority of the posts, I have some reservations - uploading to CPAN and PrePan is not as simple as a git push. Registering through PAUSE and then properly uploading to CPAN with a zip file through their UI or through FTP.<p>I think CPAN and co could use an infrastructure update.