Looking at the last-updated date and the version number is not very useful.

Looking at the date means that a module that you'd consider to be a good candidate today will magically stop being a good candidate in a few years time. This is nonsense, of course. A module not being updated could just mean that no bugs have been reported. The latest release of Class::CanBeA is three years old, because three years ago is the last time anyone reported a bug or asked for a feature.

And going by the version number is equally silly. Version numbers don't mean a thing. Wanna know why Devel::CheckLib is only version 0.5? It's because I'm a perfectionist and don't consider it to be complete until it works on VMS. But as a user, you almost certainly don't care about VMS. And if you *do* care about VMS, then there's nothing else that does the job anyway (and patches welcome!). Then there's Scalar::Properties currently (and for the last year) at version 0.13. It has gone through many releases and is damned useful, despite its measly little version number.

In reply to Re: How to pick a CPAN module by DrHyde
in thread How to pick a CPAN module by dragonchild

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