Some of my red flags are:

  1. Poor test suite. I have an immense distrust of any module without a good test suite. If all it does is check that the module loads okay then I'm going to be suspicious.
  2. Poor documentation. If I can't understand what the module does from the synopsis and description I usually can't be bothered to read further. If something still has an unchanged POD template from h2xs then I'm very unlikely to look any further.
  3. When there is a module that does something similar and there are no notes on why module X should be used instead of module Y (++ points for explaining when module Y should be used instead of module X).
  4. Bad module names tend to put me off: Things that claim a new top-level name space; Lowercase modules that are not pragmas; Non-descriptive names; etc.

Update:: Additional red flags

In reply to Re: CPAN Module Evaluation Red-Flags by adrianh
in thread CPAN Module Evaluation Red-Flags by bsb

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