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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • CPAN is Unusable (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bart (450)
    The new version still offers no substantial improvements with regards to what was said in the Lightning Talk CPAN is Unusable [omor.com]. The problems were, and actually still are, that it's not clear which links lead to downloads (the top section), and which to documentation (the rest). Only people familiar with CPAN know where to click for what.

    • So click something and figure it out or use the other search engines listed on the front page of CPAN. I've not finished the new FAQ but, then again, the old one with pictures and arrows with detailed explanations didn't seem to help that guy out before so I wouldn't expect it to help him or you now. Be adventurous...go ahead, click a link and live a little.

      • I think a significant number of people see a code snippet in
        the Cookbook or on Perl.com, try it out, and are
        discouraged when their code snippet fails because it uses a
        non-standard module.

        I'd like such people to find a gentler introduction to
        adding modules to their distribution than clicking around
        in circles. Offering an easier CPAN is I think better direction
        than dumbing down public code, eg

        Any contributed scripts must therefore follow certain rules:
        They must not use any non-standard Perl modules.
        I know this is a bit contentious, but I really
        think that the target audience will have
        problems installing modules from CPAN
        (from nms [sourceforge.net]).

        search.cpan.org is amongst the most obvious presences of
        and entry points to CPAN, hence my interest in improving
        search.cpan.org.

        (I'll save my views on division of labour between finding
        problems         and offering improvements for another time.)

        I'll post some style=newbie mockup before YAPC03.

        eg, could be used as
        http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=module& style=newbie&query=RSS

        --
        dc
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