A few examples:

• The Poop-Group summary page lists and compares database object persistence modules.
• I've used a similar format in my review of method-generating modules, although this remains incomplete.
• The DateTime group is attempting to synthesize the best ideas from the existing Date::* and Time::* modules into a single coherent collection.

Given the difficulty in evaluating modules without fully understanding the context they're used in, I think this type of topic-area review might be as good as it gets, at least in the short term.

Thank you for your items. These are partially the sort of lists that help in digesting information. It would be nice to have a, um, list of lists.

my @a=qw(random brilliant braindead); print $a[rand(@a)];

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

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

It is very good to have. But there is still the moderating system that is needed (or would be nice). A module, such as CGI would be off the charts. Others - even some listed under reviews - would have a low score. If you could sort by category, and then score or vice versa you could more quickly zero in on a module.

my @a=qw(random brilliant braindead); print $a[rand(@a)];

Who's going to moderate? That's a big question that you can't just wave your hands at ...

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

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

Here is one idea... Write some perl code that will examine CPAN to determine how many times a particular module is used by other CPAN modules and scripts.

Sort of a googlish approach to module usefulness or popularity, I suppose, but I think the results would be interesting.

It would be more effective to know how many times those modules are used outside of CPAN, but obviously that becomes problematic. Perhaps something that could search the archive of comp.lang.perl.misc to see how many times a particular module gets mentioned?

</ajdelore>

That wouldn't give much useful statistics. It would at best give some measure of popularity, but not at all at usefulness. Some problems: there's no way to count how often the modules are used in programs, as programs are hardly uploaded to CPAN. You'd just count how often other modules use them. Furthermore, it would show a strong bias in favour of modules that don't have alternatives. For instance DBI. There isn't a module that does something similar, so the DBI would get high marks, even if the code itself is shitty.

I wouldn't bother going to a site that ranks CPAN modules based on a popularity vote. After all, Windows isn't ten times better than Unix as an OS, is it? But that would be the outcome if you'd let people vote.

I would value a site that does reviews of modules. Non-anonymous reviews, so a reviewer can establish a name for him/herself. Some monks are already exploring this idea after a similar discussion last week.

Abigail

First: some folks are putting their money where their mouth is and providing a place to talk about CPAN modules. Gavin Estey recently created a wiki site for people to comment on CPAN modules. Check it out.

Second: it really does seem counterproductive to have so many modules, many of which duplicate one another. At least until you think about the CPAN and the community using it as a marketplace of ideas. Just like a normal marketplace there's lots of competition and seemingly little differentiation in areas where many people congregate (e.g., templating, web applications, accessing databases) and that have a fairly low barrier to entry. There's not as much competition in more esoteric problemspaces (largescale number crunching, biological analysis, etc.).

And just like a marketplace certain products win not just by being the best (however that's defined) but by attracting other people to support and discuss it by other means (good documentation, professional website, excellent support, charismatic leader, strong forum presence, etc.). Arbitrarily weeding modules out (even bad ones, which I bitched about recently) is unnecessary -- the bad ones will fall by the wayside, never updated and never discussed. It can be tough to distinguish these but time, and articles written by an expert (like Perrin) are IMO the best solutions.

Anyway, my point is that having all these modules and the interplay among them is the best way for the cream to rise to the top. Maybe in a year I'll get tired of supporting SPOPS and contribute to Class::DBI or Alzabo. Or maybe someone will pick up the ball. Or maybe something new will come along trumping us all. Who can predict the future? All I know is it's an awful lot of fun being in the marketplace, as chaotic and messy as it can be.

Chris
M-x auto-bs-mode

I think Gavin Estrey's site is a GREAT idea. I was just going to suggest if we could have a central place where we could dicuss specific CPAN modules. Many of the larger projects have mailing lists and/or sourceforge projects.

I author a smaller module (Finance::YahooProfile) that is used by at least 20 people that I know of. I feel too lazy to maintain a website, discussion board, and a mailing list for this. I would like it if there were an auto-generated sourceforge-like site for CPAN modules.

For now, I like the CPAN wiki and will start using it extensively. Especially given the open-source nature of CPAN people other than the author will discover bugs or new ways to use the module. A wiki allows everyone to add to the documentation.

$will->code for @food or $$;

Better yet, a central place to WORK on *any* CPAN module. Imagine the wiki idea, but with code + comments rather than just comments. Imagine that you could click your way through the code for say, Date::Manip, cheerfully categorising algorithms (finite state machine here), doing tiny cleanups on code (doesn't handle corner case X), suggesting and branching new areas to work on larger refactorings, add tests to the test suite, and have that all linked into a system that automatically builds stable and beta branches, runs the test suites, and indicates their status, and permits CVS/Subversion checkouts of any given tree by ID or a gzip'd download of same for the purposes of testing on your local system.

Imagine running into a bug in a CPAN module and not having to file a bug report, simply hopping onto the site and branching in a fix with a comment, and adding a test case.

Imagine running a class for programming students, and being able to assign homework as walking through certain CPAN modules categorising algorithms or patterns.

Imagine having 20 minutes without anything to do, hopping onto the site and refactoring a tiny mess in a single function in a random module into something clean and elegant.

Imagine a site where sections of code have been voted especially clean, or especially messy and deserving of attention, so that rather than avoid using them or reimplementing from scratch, they can be bit-by-bit cleaned up and refactored.

Imagine a site where common code across many modules is regularly identified and abstracted into a common module, slowly building up a pool of best-of-breed module support code created and reviewed by many, used in many modules. No more hackish reimplementations, just a slowly expanding core of solid code.

Imagine contributing a module and watching it grow and stabilise every day as people from across the world spend a little bit of their time commenting and cleaning and refactoring.

Wouldn't it be cool? :)

artist

--hsm

--BorgCopyeditor (IRL)
(sans password ATM)
:)

Peer review could be hard for two reasons: 1) no contribution, and 2) too many contribution. You could have modules no one cares to write review for. Or you could have modules that have way too many reviews.

Rating system (unmoderated probably) is a good feasible compromised solution. Just as people rate on movie online. I don't know how philosophically agreeable or disagreeable it is to other people.

SourceForge and some other open source portals have download and activity statistics for every project, which give you some indirect hint about the product. It's not a technically difficult to implement, just a matter of whether people like it or not.

Another mindless indicator could be querying how many times a module being used by all other modules. Of course, whatever indicators you used, they should be compared preferably within comparable modules (it won't be fair to compare the popularity of Carp to, say, PARI).