On 02/20/04 01:22, David Manura wrote:... It would have been better to download all the CPAN modules and do source code analysis directly on them.
I use Randal Schwartz' minicpan script <http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/LinuxMag/col42.html> to gather statistics about metadata, to list distributions with nested Makefiles, multiple XS files, etc. (ex. <http://www.thepierianspring.org/meta_stats.pl.html>)
The only problem is that Randal's script sometimes grabs more than just the most recent version of some modules which can skew statistics somewhat.
Thanks, Randy, I will use that.
Michel Rodriguez wrote: > On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, David Manura wrote: >>========= CPAN top 10 ============= >> >>XML::Parser : 7.68246933302234 > > First, good job! > > Then a comment on the area I know best, that shows the limits of the > method (which doesn't mean that it is not useful, au contraire, just that > the results should come with a warning). > > I don't know whether it's the same in other cases: lots of modules depend > on XML::Parser, but that doesn't make it the right tool to use to parse > XML. In fact one of the reason so many other modules were written on top > of XML::Parser is that there is quite a bit of a learning curve when you > start using it.
True. It does suggest though that XML::Parser is the right tool when writing a CPAN module, such as an XML parsing module. So, there could indeed be a difference in the needs of application authors (who are not directly represented in the dataset) and module authors.
-davidm
