Poor Santa. It's getting close to Christmas, and he still hasn't made his list of CPAN authors yet! Who will get coal? Who will get a present?

With the clock ticking, he decides to automate his list building with Perl, but still needs to check it twice.

Santa doesn't need a GUI, he likes the terminal just fine, so he's going to write a program to decide if the CPAN authors are naughty or nice and then prompt him to confirm each one.

How should he prompt? He likes the nice simple prompt of ExtUtils::MakeMaker, should he use it?

    $ perl -MExtUtils::MakeMaker -wE 'prompt("Naughy?", "yes")'
    Naughty? [yes]

Loading all of ExtUtils::MakeMaker just to get a prompt is just a little bit gross, so maybe he can do better. Next stop… CPAN!

So many prompting modules to choose from… (sigh)… the usual problem with CPAN. But wait, look! A "Tiny" module, and it works exactly like ExtUtils::MakeMaker… IO::Prompt::Tiny.

Santa decides to give it a try:

use v5.14;
use warnings;

use File::Slurp qw/write_file/;
use IO::Prompt::Tiny qw/prompt/;
use ORDB::CPANUploads;
use Time::Piece;

# Find each CPAN author's latest release date
# If they didn't release in 2012, let's call them naughty
my $results = ORDB::CPANUploads->selectall_arrayref(
  'select author, max(released) from uploads group by author',
);

# Make a list
my %list;

for my $author (@$results) {
  my $id   = $author->[0];
  my $date = gmtime( $author->[1] );

  # Check it once
  my $prompt = sprintf( "\n%-9s released on %s.  Naughty? (yes/no)", $id, $date );
  my $ans = prompt( $prompt, $date->year < 2012 ? "yes" : "no" );
  $list{$id} = ( $ans =~ /^y/i ? "naughty" : "nice" );

  # Check it twice
  my $check = prompt( "Are you sure $id is $list{$id}? (yes/no)", "yes" );
  redo unless $check =~ /^y/i;
}

write_file(
  'list.txt',
  { atomic => 1 },
  map { "$_ is $list{$_}\n" } sort keys %list
);

Excellent, now he's ready to make his list and find all those naughty CPAN authors who haven't released in 2012:

    $ perl naughty-or-nice.pl

    AADLER    released on Sun Feb 13 20:32:59 2011.  Naughty? (yes/no) [yes] 
    Are you sure AADLER is naughty? (yes/no) [yes] 

    AAKD      released on Wed Nov  9 06:26:08 2005.  Naughty? (yes/no) [yes] 
    Are you sure AAKD is naughty? (yes/no) [yes] 

    AAKHTER   released on Thu Nov 10 03:18:33 2005.  Naughty? (yes/no) [yes] 
    Are you sure AAKHTER is naughty? (yes/no) [yes] 

    AALLAN    released on Fri Nov 17 20:44:54 2006.  Naughty? (yes/no) [yes] 
    Are you sure AALLAN is naughty? (yes/no) [yes] 

    AANOAA    released on Sat Feb 12 09:10:34 2011.  Naughty? (yes/no) [yes] 
    Are you sure AANOAA is naughty? (yes/no) [yes] 

    AAR       released on Sun Mar 11 19:50:00 2012.  Naughty? (yes/no) [no] 
    Are you sure AAR is nice? (yes/no) [yes] 

    AARDEN    released on Wed Apr 30 16:19:59 2003.  Naughty? (yes/no) [yes] 
    Are you sure AARDEN is naughty? (yes/no) [yes]

    ⋮

    ZWON      released on Thu Sep  1 15:21:14 2011.  Naughty? (yes/no) [yes] yes
    Are you sure ZWON is naughty? (yes/no) [yes] yes

    ZZZ       released on Tue Aug 16 17:05:53 2011.  Naughty? (yes/no) [yes] yes
    Are you sure ZZZ is naughty? (yes/no) [yes] yes

After bouncing on the return key almost 12,000 times, Santa is ready for Christmas on CPAN!

See Also

• IO::Prompt::Tiny

• IO::Prompt::Hooked - a handy, minimalist validation wrapped around IO::Prompt::Tiny

• IO::Prompter - a feature-packed all-singing all-dancing bit of Damianware

• IO::Prompter::Tinier - not yet written