On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 05:26:08PM +0000, Graham Barr wrote: > On Nov 17, 2003, at 16:49, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote: > >>search assumes that any upload of a dist should be considered latest. > >>This is correct 99.999% of the time. The perl dist is an exception to > >>this rule. I need to add some code to trap it, but have not done so > >>yet. > > > >Side note : > >I can imagine other exceptions : all dists that maintain two > >branches. > >An example would be GD -- GD 1.x and 2.x are interface to two > >different branches of libgd. > >Another will be mod_perl, when the mod_perl 2 branch will cease > >to have alpha version numbers a la "1.99_xx". > > Yes, I know. > > What would be good, IMO. Is a metadata entry that can be used to group > dists together. > > Currently we group all dists by their name. But if we had identifiers > to identify sub-groups then we could at least place links on the dist > pages. eg perl-5.6, perl-5.8 GD-1, GD-2, mod_perl-1, mod_perl-2
Meanwhile a reasonable huristic would be to treat the number before the decimal point in a version as the group (if the version contains a decimal point andthe metadata doesn't define grouping). Either way the search.cpan.org UI needs to support the concept. It already shows "Latest Release" when the current isn't the latest. Where a distribution has more than one group it could simply make that plural "Latest Releases" and have one row on the right hand side per group. The "url without a version" would continue to show the latest (in the current sense) and could very naturally be extended to include the group number: http://search.cpan.org/~ddumont/Tk-ObjScanner-2/ (for Tk-ObjScanner-2.005) http://search.cpan.org/~ddumont/Tk-ObjScanner-1/ (for Tk-ObjScanner-1.022) Tim.
