No, I want to be able to link to the distribution dir, e.g.:Actually, it does work <http://search.cpan.org/~lds/CGI.pm/>, or is this not what you meant?
http://search.cpan.org/~lds/CGI.pm-3.00/
without that -3.00 version in the path, so it'll always point to the latest distro.
I didn't know that (it's not obvious). But what if the author changes? There should be a way to say that without including the author name.
/dist/ as I pointed out in another message
Also CGI.pm is bad example, as it has .pm in its name and you need to know that its distro includes that .pm string. Let's take Apache::Request as a better example. I want to be able to say:
http://search.cpan.org/whatever?Apache::Request and expect to be taken to the distro dir that contains the latest version of the package, which is at the moment: http://search.cpan.org/~joesuf/libapreq-1.3/
It was not clear that is what you were trying todo. You want to link to the dist page by giving the name of a module in the dist. search currently cannot do that
So in documentation pods one can say something like:
When you use Apache::Request (L<http://search.cpan.org/whatever?Apache::Request>) bla bla...
and the user clicking on this link will be taken to
http://search.cpan.org/~joesuf/libapreq-1.3/
and from there he can decide to read the docs or download the distro or do other things.
That URL in my docs will always work correctly even if the author or version numbers change.
I'd suggest that search.cpan.org will have a new option 'direct' in addition to module, dist, author and all. So that http://search.cpan.org/search?query=Apache::Request&mode=direct will take me direct to the distro containing this package?
Ick!. /search is for "searching" not for direct links. Any direct link should have a different URL IMO.
I will add this type of link to my todo list.
Graham.
