in reply to Perl Monks += TMTOWTDI

A common case is when one module is built on another. This can be strictly defined by the use or require constructs. A catalog of CPAN modules categorized by that should be usefull. You could easilly check if there are some new modules built on the module you know (or you have just found by some other means). This should be quite effective way of searching since new modules add to the older ones - so if you know a module you would use for the job there is much chance that a module based on it does much of the work you planned to do yourself.

Update: Added some argumentation.

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Re^2: Perl Monks += TMTOWTDI (social solutions, mostly)
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Apr 14, 2003 at 19:25 UTC
    That sounds like the only remotely possible way to automatically classify modules. Other than that, all I can think of are social solutions such as asking people about their favourite modules in a place like this. The first mention I saw of WWW::Mechanize, f.ex, which hacker mentions, was the Perl Advent Calendar for 2002, which is basically Mark Fowler's "favourite modules this Xmas" site.

    Makeshifts last the longest.

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Re: Re: Perl Monks += TMTOWTDI
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Mar 10, 2004 at 18:17 UTC
    This won't work. In Excel::Template, I am forced to load at runtime the rendering module I'm using, based on a flag passed in to the constructor. Spreadsheet::WriteExcel has a 7MB limit. Spreadsheet::WriteExcel::Big doesn't, but both depends on a number of other modules and (currently) has not been made to work with mod_perl. Your method will miss the fact that Excel::Template is an interface to Spreadsheet::WriteExcel and Spreadsheet::WriteExcel::Big.

    It may be a good start, but would have to be modified by people knowledgable about the guts of various modules (like, say, the current maintainers).

    ------
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    Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

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