There was a discussion a few months ago about a proposed change in the [cpan://module] shortcut to link to distributions rather than module search results, which was (rightly) rejected as breaking links on existing nodes.

At the cost of flogging an expired quadruped, I'd like to propose a variation on that suggestion which (hopefully) won't break existing links, while adding the capability mirod was requesting.

The proposal: CPAN links which contain a hyphen should be converted to http://search.cpan.org/dist/ form. To allow linking to single-word distributions, such links should also have any trailing hyphens removed.

Module names can't contain hyphens, so there shouldn't be any existing nodes that would trigger this behavior; all past and future posts using the existing syntax will be unaffected.

This seems like a straightforward change, but I haven't poked through the monastery code base to see whether there would be more complications than expected...

Update: if the regex is general enough, this also lets you link to specific files in the distribution:

In reply to A Modest Proposal for [cpan://module] Shortcuts by simonm

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