The joy of small projects and simple specs
Last night I wrote a little code with no plans to release it. All I wanted was a little a script to read .torrent files, so I tried to use the Convert::Bencode and Convert::Bencode_XS modules for the job. Unfortunately, neither of them worked on any of the files I tried to read. So I ended up rolling my own, and while I only intended to implement the minimum I needed, I found that the bencode format is so simple that writing a partial implementation is not even possible.
So now there was one working bencode implementation in my script, and none on CPAN. Why not upload the code? And that’s what I did. I poached the unit tests from the original bencode.py, made them all pass, and then wrapped it all into a package and dropped it in CPAN’s lap.