in reply to search.cpan.org comments/discussion

I've had the title "The Annotated CPAN" swimming around in my head for a while now. Something that pretty much does what you're talking about. Between USENET, Perl Monks, and other Web Sites out there one could come up with a pretty hard core resource. (FYI, I am a fanatic when it comes to cataloging things. My all time hero is Ludwig Von Köchel, the guy who fanatically cataloged the works of Mozart.)

Here's a couple of things that I would add to what you have said:

I should say that I'm pretty pleased with the new version of search.cpan.org but there's no reason why the community can't do more...

++ for bringing this up! 

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Re: Re: search.cpan.org comments/discussion
by grantm (Parson) on Sep 09, 2002 at 00:43 UTC
    Link to the latest version of each module, as opposed to the raw search results that one gets now

    Yes, that is a bit annoying and probably something that ought to be fixed. Is there in fact a way to link directly to the main page for the 'latest' version of a distribution on search.cpan.org (without having to specify the author's CPAN ID)?

[reply]

      I got an email reply from Graham Barr that this format link does work: http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl. From the PM side, there are a couple of gotcha's:

      • you have to use the distribution name which might not be the commonly used name (eg: libwww-perl rather than LWP
      • you have to remember that distribution names use hyphens rather than double colons (eg: XML-Parser)
      • don't forget about case sensitivity

      Given all this, it's not hard to see why the [cpan://name] links go to the search function but if you get the module name wrong (eg http://search.cpan.org/dist/xml::parser) then search.cpan.org falls back to search mode anyway.

      So, perhaps the implementation of the [cpan://name] links should be fixed to change '::' to '-' and then point to search.cpan.org/dist/name

[reply]
        There is a big difference between a distribution and a module. Substituting :: with - will not work for most modules.

        I would like to see the cpan links to link to http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?module

        right now that is an issue for modules that don't have pod, but we can fix that

[reply]
      Yes, a google style "lucky" option, the old behavior. I emailed the webmaster about this sometime ago, but the more people that do the more likely it is to be implemented?

      --
      perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"

[reply]
        I am considering a google style lucky option, but it is not high on the todo list right now
[reply]

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