This is something that should have been tried a long time ago. I'm glad that there was someone who could sidestep the whole debate and just implement it. It may work or it may fail but either way we won't have to have the argument again.

There is a lesson here for nit-pickers: stop debating, start coding.

--
John.

Also up on use.perl now.

CPAN voting system requires that you attach a review of a module to your vote. Is this a necessary evil?

Ciao, Valerio

I was wondering what this will do to the "Module Reviews" section on Perl Monks. There aren't too many people writing reviews to begin with ;-(

I just tried cross-posting my cpan-upload review, but that just looks afwul. So no easy cross-posting between Perl Monks Module Reviews and CPAN (well, search.cpan.org actually).

Liz

Update:
Found the "edit" button, so made the thing a more bearable by removing all of the fancy stuff.

I just tried cross-posting my cpan-upload review, but that just looks afwul. So no easy cross-posting...

Eeek, visible HTML markup. :)

Given the mass of tradeoffs, I can understand the perl.org developers' decision to stick with plain text for the reviews, although its limitations can be frustrating.

If you want to cross-post, copying the rendered text from your browser and pasting it in to the text area will at least give you a minimally readable format...

I strongly prefer requiring an explanation of your rating. I'd find a bunch of unsupported numbers much less useful and would expect such to be much less accurate. I like being able to see *why* that one person gave a module "zero stars" and being able to tell that none of the people giving that module perfect scores make any mention of trying X.¹

That this will likely result in 10 reviews (that I have a hope of getting a lot of information out of) instead of 200 rating numbers (which is 1/100th as useful, not 20-times more useful), is not a problem for me.

If you are worried about some modules never getting reviewed, I think that will be easy to correct other than for modules that are not worth mentioning.

                - tye

¹"X" is a generic placeholder despite the increasingly common practice of idiotic marketing/naming of windowing systems, operating systems, "active" web content, etc. q-:

I think you could argue it both ways. It stands in the way of quick ratings, but is more likely to allow a reasoned judgement on the validity of the review.

What about outdated reviews? I know of a few modules which would get a bad rating because of the authors ignorance, but bug reports have been submitted to correct for it. So what happens after the bugs have been fixed? Can you revise your review/rating? I have not tried this thing out yet.

update: i'm not gonna try this out (gotta sign up for yet another account, no thank you).

MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"

I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).

** The third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.