I've thought about this sort of thing too. The problem is the only definitive information about a module is it's POD (and code). Unless you try it, or you're very good at reading code, the only way to select a module is by what it's POD claims to do. Those claims may be incorrect, poorly communicated, or mis-understood. Additionally, it may be hard to find a group of comparable modules.

Various people have tried to solve this problem, with the likes of CPAN Ratings, AnnoCPAN, reviews like those on this site, etc. The problem is, it's easy for someone to completely miss all those. They may just do a quick search in the CPAN shell, browse some PODs, and install one or two that look reasonable. Maybe they don't install properly on their system, maybe they don't work as advertised, maybe they don't quite meet the current needs. All these things can waste a lot of time - our most valuable development resource.

I think ratings, reviews, categories, etc. are definitely moving in the right direction. But I think they need to be centralised in some way. The obvious answer is to build these things into CPAN. Then they're available no matter how you access it

OK, that may be a lot of work, and maybe even impractical, but to me, that's the "ideal" solution to this problem.

In reply to Re^2: How does one choose among modules? by Mutant
in thread How does one choose among modules? by mr_mischief

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