in reply to Direct links to module documentation

I think this is a great idea. In a "Perl Monks Discussion" a while ago I suggested putting the docs for all CPAN modules on Perlmonks (in the library). Doing that would make it easy to make the links point to the right place w/o involving an outside site that we do not have direct controll over (a-la search.cpan.org). I think the "CPAN module links" should point to the module's documentation, the module can already be installed easily enough by using the CPAN module itself. The RFC link would be great too.. and particularly easy to implement since RFC's use a simple numbering scheme.
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RE: RE: Direct links to module documentation
by Corion (Patriarch) on Jun 04, 2000 at 05:13 UTC

    Having the complete documentation available on the site would be a cool thing, but I think there are some problems with that idea :

    Keeping the documentation current would be difficult, as every updated module would have to be downloaded from CPAN and the documentation would have to be generated (I guess that make documentation is not really standard).

    The storage available to Perlmonks is not unlimited and I rather download the Not found page and click on the CPAN search link than missing some Haikus or some interesting question here - maybe vroom could comment on how scarce disk space is for Perlmonks :).

[reply]
      Before I found search.cpan.org I had started a project to build a complete CPAN module documentation site. I already had the system partly developed and still have the code kicking around.

      It is easy to automatically scan through CPAN on a scheduled basis and spot new/changed modules (thank to the CPAN modules page). I don't think that detecting module version changes in real-time is necessary as most people don't upgrade modules the minute a new version comes out. If you really want to split hairs on this issue you would need to have the docs for EVERY version of EVERY module. I don't think this granularity is necessary. Modules (and their documentation) generally don't change significantly from version to version, so any recent version of the documentation for a module would be sufficient for anything but the most percise needs (not to even mention that the docs aren't always up-to-date with the code). A nightly update would be more than adequate.

      I did some metrics and found that the average module had about 8 K of POD documentation throughout all of its files. There are currently about 1500 modules on CPAN. Alowing a generous buffer for added markup all the documentation should fit in under 20 MB. Not a lot of space to ask for in today's world.

      Also I do not have %100 confidence in search.cpan.org as I sometimes find module documentation missing.

      I would be happy to devote my time, expertise and my partially developed system to bring complete CPAN documentation on as a Perlmonks feature.

[reply]

        You sound as if you have analyzed most of the possible problems already and even have some almost-working code ready - which eliminates my reservations about this :) - and you even offer your time to implement a CPAN documentation mirror.

        Now we just have to wait what fellow monks have to say to this idea and what vrooms position is on that...

[reply]

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