Hello

I created a module that, for the moment, is called Date::Iterator, and I am discussing about the opportunity of putting it on CPAN. This node, as my latest one, arises from a discussion on the module-authors list. All started here, and my first bunch of conclusions, form which I'll borrow some text, is here.

I have seen "CPAN pollution" used in a context where it meant that you have many modules that do the same thing

I personally don't agree with that definition

When you have many modules that do the same thing, you probabily have some of poor quality and some good. Should the "bad" ones be stopped before they reach CPAN? Or shouldn't we take advantage of the newly added rating feature for CPAN modules to tell the good from the bad ones?

If we had a "sort by rating" on search.cpan.org that could be, IMHO, a solution. Besides, there are good reasons to require a registration before you can rate a module, but the tradeoff is that not many people are rating modules at this time... maybe anonymous voting should be allowed, possibly stating how many anonymous votes a module received (e.g. My::Module: rating ****, 123 votes out of 234 were anonymous)

The possibility of rating a module should also be advertised by the CPAN module itself after a successful installation (or does recent versions already do it?).

The really bad thing about having many modules to do the same thing is that probabily those module authors could work together to bring a unique, powerful module to the community (the efforts diluitions that mirod saw in the mailing list). But when it doesn't happen, shouldn't be the community itself to choose?

Ciao!
--bronto

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz

In reply to What do we mean with "CPAN pollution"? by bronto

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