All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Hi! First Entry and blogging about CPAN

Perldroid on 2005-07-14T23:52:40

Is there anybody out there?
Anybody listening to me?

Anyway, I'll do my very best.

Since nobody will listen to me either, i can babble as well.

Lately my friends had an interesting idea.

How about introducing a voting system into CPAN?

Displaying:

  • The number of downloads of each module
  • a simple voting, like on the vim scripting site
This would help making decisions for the users. The current problem with CPAN is not that there are not enough modules, but that there are too many modules. And many of them long not supported or working only halfway. Some modules are not very useful and sitting at a nice place where some other module would be placed better.
Most of the time one spends in deciding which module is best for the job is wasted by figuring out which module is really working and working nicely.
*Hummmm*
*Bzzzzzz*
Have to go now.
Thank you for the fish!

Marvin

CPAN Ratings

autrijus on 2005-07-15T02:11:24

In a module's search.cpan.org homepage there is already a five-star metric with number of votes in the CPAN rantings -- I mean ratings -- site.

The other half of what you want

Alias on 2005-07-15T06:38:17

autrijus mentioned cpanratings which covers the voting system. The other half of what you want, the CPAN statistics system, has a long and controvertial history, mainly because several of the CPAN illumanati think it's primarily a vanity thing.

However, if you did want to go ahead, there is a proposal for it available here.

This proposal has been fought over long and hard, and has the tenuous and hesitant approval of _some_ of said illumanati. It's considered to be the "least evil" proposal currently available.

You'd do well to either look at implementing parts of it, or at least reading it thoroughly to get an idea on what the current state of CPAN stats is.

Re:The other half of what you want

hfb on 2005-07-15T08:25:28

No, *sigh* it's not a vanity thing...no one ever reads the FAQ and somehow this comes up each and every year like a virus. The FAQ points to http://xxx.lanl.gov/help/faq/statfaq because it is applicable...that any 'stats' you generate will be wildly inaccurate which, for a group of geeks who split hairs on the usage of virus vs. virii, would seem anathema but curiously disbelief in the contraints of a widely distributed network prevail. We're not fighting you, we're just telling you that whatever results you generate will be horribly inaccurate, likely some will game the system and will be ultimately counterproductive. I still have a ray of hope for CPANTS - http://cpants.dev.zsi.at/ - to provide inherently useful and objective stats for CPAN but few seem to want to help Thomas and it involves a lot of work, including the XML standard for modules that never quite got rolling either. Numbers of downloads really doesn't mean quite much when there are so many other important and accurate statistics that could be generated.

And, aside from despising the 'illuminati' tag, I'm the only person that I know of associated with CPAN that you've talked to directly about this so next time just write my name instead as it'll make you sound less like a circuitous dork dropping hints without the balls to identify who doesn't like the idea. You've been talking about this for years....we can't stop you so don't blame our giving you our opinion for not building a prototype and convincing us otherwise.