pileofrogs has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Is there a tool or web page that can tell you how often a module gets used in other modules on CPAN? If not, I might just make one.

This would go a long way to answering the age old "which XXX module should I use?" where XXX is a technology where there are several modules and it's not obvious which one to use. It would also give a nice top 10 list which would be a great thing for newbies to see. ("Oh, what's this Carp thing?")

Someone already made it, didn't they?

--Pileofrogs

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: CPAN reference counter?
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Feb 02, 2010 at 18:22 UTC

    I started doing an enhanced version of this two years ago. Got pretty far. I was counting L<>s into other packages too. Problem is it's not trivial and requires a lot of churn to keep up; the CPAN is large and a lot of it is a moving target. There are an awful lot of package uploads for a dead language. :) I don't have a free box right now and I'm swamped with more pressing stuff so I never finished.

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      Could you give me what you've got (or point me to it) and I could give it a try?

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        I think so. I'll message you tonight if I can dig the code out of my old box. I'm still interested in it as a project so perhaps you'd be willing to work on it with me. My intention was to turn it into the back end for a website.

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Re: CPAN reference counter?
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Feb 02, 2010 at 18:18 UTC

    http://deps.cpantesters.org/

    No, that's backwards. It shows what modules the specified module uses, not the modules by which the specified module is used.

    You could surely reuse a big chunk of that code, though.

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        CPANTS was never particularly accurate in my experience anyway. I suppose I could handle the reverse mapping myself though. Patches welcome, of course :-)
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