Interesting. I hadn't thought of that angle. I'd always assumed that people don't check the CPAN, and your postulate seems to be that CPAN isn't comprehensive enough in its searching capabilities. I know I've had problems with search.cpan.org before, where things that I would have expected to find were not found.

I'm concerned about just pushing the laziness angle. Lord knows there are enough negative-scored posts here in the monastery that say things like "How do I write a game in Perl?".

Who remembers years ago in comp.lang.perl.misc when tchrist posted his rants about the nice beach that was overrun by people who didn't want to make the beach nice, and only wanted to take? While I certainly take issue with how he expressed his views, I agree with most of his points. There's a wealth of information in the community, but posting blindly "Hey, do my homework" isn't going to help anyone.

So let me rephrase a different way: How can we as the Perl Community help others to help themselves?

xoxo,
Andy

%_=split/;/,".;;n;u;e;ot;t;her;c; ".   #   Andy Lester
'Perl ;@; a;a;j;m;er;y;t;p;n;d;s;o;'.  #   http://petdance.com
"hack";print map delete$_{$_},split//,q<   andy@petdance.com   >