[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Randy W. Sims) writes:
> Looks like you and Simon should collaborate.
We've been chatting.
> Is it possible or realistic for it to have pluggable search & browse
> engines.
I think so. There are three things at issue, all of which can and should be
implemented distinctly:
1) Viewing the contents of packages
2) "Browsing" by category
3) Searching
I have no desire to work on 1), since I think search.cpan.org does this very
well. (Andy agrees with this idea.)
I have no idea to work on 2), since I think that all browsing is a subset of
searching - for instance, browsing by keyword is just doing a search for a
particular keyword; browsing all modules is just doing a search for
type:module, and so on. (Andy... well, tolerates this idea. ;)
3) is the thing I want to work on, and Andy wants to work on 2), so my plan
for the time being is to index all the CPAN module metadata and link search
results to the current search.cpan.org pages for displaying a given module.
Then Andy can come along and turn canned searches into a "browse" interface
on top of that.
> I still think sourceforge-like hierchical catagories (Topics) in META.yml
> would make for good light-weight search and improved by-catagory browsing
I disagree quite violently with this, but I'm not going to implement searching
and indexing in a way that precludes it. I think that the world moved from
browse to search some time in the mid 90s (hell, we're even being encouraged
to search rather than browse email these days) and that this is because
browsing is useful if your search engine isn't good enough. Even so, I
recognise that everyone who comes to working on CPAN metadata has their own
conceptual axe to grind, so I'll just index whatever the heck is in META.yml
and let everone else sort out the details.
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