All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Redundant modules

djberg96 on 2003-01-04T21:34:05

From the Department of Redundancy Department:

Slurp - Slurp entire files into variables

Apparently the author never bothered to even search on the word "slurp" on cpan. If he had, he would have found File::Slurp which has been around for quite some time, iirc. I don't see anything in the docs to indicate it does anything different.

Is CPAN getting to the point where we need a "redundancy avoidance committee"?

hmmm

gav on 2003-01-04T22:12:31

It's a bit different from File::Slurp but it's got a bit of a funky interface and it's not in the File:: namespace which would be the obvious place to find it.

I've thought of a different interface to CPAN where only certain modules are listed. The problem is that for beginners, searching for something returns a scary amount of results.

Search results for a variety of common terms:

CGI - 1770
DBI - 1431
MySQL - 626
Apache - 1682
XML - 1914
HTML - 3291
Template - 1091
Class - 5684
File - 8695

This is a bit overwhelming. Wouldn't it be nice if say only 10 or of the more important modules were listed, with the rest available if you wanted?

Re:hmmm

djberg96 on 2003-01-05T03:41:21

I agree that search.cpan returns way too many results for searches. It hasn't been a problem for me personally, so I haven't complained, but it's not very useful beyond the first page of results, really.

Anyway, I only mentioned it because some there have been some grumblings from others lately, so I thought I'd chime in.

Re:hmmm

nik on 2003-01-06T10:41:44

This is a bit overwhelming. Wouldn't it be nice if say only 10 or of the more important modules were listed, with the rest available if you wanted?

It would be interesting if CPAN supported voting/recommending modules, with an option to view search results in recommendation rank order. Or attaching comments to a module's page...

N

Re:hmmm

nicholas on 2003-01-06T14:53:32

It would be interesting if CPAN supported voting/recommending modules, with an option to view search results in recommendation rank order. Or attaching comments to a module's page...

Or returning search results ranked in order of various automatically determined metrics, such as:

  • Number of CPAN testers failures
  • Number of regression tests. (Hell, determining if a modules has regression tests, and has more than the 1 test h2xs gives you for free would be a better ordering criterion than currently)
  • Code coverage of regression tests
  • Documentation coverage

This is ordering search results based on CPANTS, isn't it? Whatever happened to that?

redundancy avoidance committee

brian_d_foy on 2003-01-04T23:35:11

The folks at modules@cpan.org take care of this for The Modules List, but anyone can still upload anything they like.

Re:redundancy avoidance committee

koschei on 2003-01-05T02:29:17

Do end users actually use The Modules List? In particular, those most likely to need it: new(ish) users. Most people seem to just head over to search.cpan.org and search.

This sounds familiar ...

broquaint on 2003-01-06T15:16:19

As a resident PerlMonk pimp I feel obliged to point to the recent module review of the module in question.

Re:This sounds familiar ...

djberg96 on 2003-01-06T21:33:51

Ouch - tell it like it is, baby! Naturally I checked to make sure no one bad mouthed any of my modules. :)

Thanks for the link. I need to visit perlmonks more often.

I think those reviews should be updated periodically. Consider the review for Spreadsheet::WriteExcel which is now two years old and the primary complaint has long since been addressed.