in reply to How to pick a CPAN module

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.

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Re^2: How to pick a CPAN module
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Nov 03, 2008 at 12:27 UTC
    I pointed out that those are metrics, not absolutes. Class::CanBeA may be a perfectly good module. That it hasn't been touched in 3 years simply means that I will look at it harder than if there were more recent releases? Why? Because I've been burned by abandonware.

    As for version numbers, I didn't talk about the magical 1.0 - I talked about 0.01, 0.02, and 0.03. I also talked about those in terms of the number of releases period that the module has had. If Scalar::Properties has had many releases, then it doesn't qualify, does it? :-)

    Though, I'm curious - what's the difference between Scalar::Properties and autobox?

    My criteria for good software:
    1. Does it work?
    2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
[reply]
      Scalar::Properties is two years older. Other than that, I'd have to read the autobox doco :-)
[reply]

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