I think having a convention to link to http://search.cpan.org/dist/* would give these pages a chance to be more visible for programers who don't know
We should be using it ANYWAY. I'm so frustrated with URLs that point to, say, search.cpan.org/author/Dis-Tro/1.74/ when Dis-Tro is now a year old. The convention of /dist/Dis-Tro/ means your link will never be out of date.
xoa
Two ways to resolve this are to have (1) the search results in search.cpan.org link to the "canonical" http://search.cpan.org/dist/* form of URL rather than the http://search.cpan.org/author/*-<version>*.pm form and (2) the CPAN pages for a module could link to or at least name the canonical URL. This will make it obvious.
Speaking of my experience, it took me some time to discover that
http://search.cpan.org/~pmqs/Compress-Zlib-1.33/Zlib.pm
can be replaced with
http://search.cpan.org/~pmqs/Compress-Zlib/Zlib.pm
and it took me much longer to discover that this can be replaced with
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Compress-Zlib/Zlib.pm
-davidm
