Mark Stosberg wrote:
Maybe the convention could be:
Review::Text::Balanced::CPANUSERNAME
Good idea, but I think that is duplicated information. CPAN already considers the uploaded user ID to be a part of the unique name of the module. Two authors can upload a module with the same name; and that is fine; they will both be displayed uniquely when found on search.cpan.org.
Of course, when installing via CPAN.pm, the indexer will only automatically choose the versions of the modules written by the current maintainer (or some rule like that). For reviews, this is not really a major consideration - except maybe for people compiling CPAN discset compilations. OTOH, a link to http://search.cpan.org/dist/Some-Dist/ will go to whichever has the highest version number (see http://search.cpan.org/dist/Data-Lazy/ for an example). Perfect.
Rather than trying to double the size of CPAN by making a review for each module, a review could cover a wide variety of different modules that cover a related problem space. The reviews could be supplemented with examples and demonstrations exhibiting strengths and weaknesses of the modules that they review - for instance, benchmarking, memory tests, etc. As new modules are written, the reviews could be extended (perhaps, but not necessarily by the same author as the original review). You will get a similar situation to many of the modules in CPAN today, which have more than a handful of maintainers who have contributed.
There's nothing to say that individual module reviews shouldn't be written, and the convention of naming the review module the same as the single module it covers with a prefix is a good one. This would almost certainly be linked to by the module which covers the generic problem space.
So, to make this distinction clear, maybe the
Guide::*
namespace should cover "problem space" reviews, and serve as something of another index to CPAN - and
Review::*
can be for more in-depth reviews of individual CPAN modules, to avoid potentional conflicts from using "Review::*" for both of these. Besides, I think Guide:: is more accurate here.
If no-one has any sound objections or beats me to the task, I will endeavour to complete Guide.pod, and Guide/Example.pod during my recreational Perl development time (not as abundant at present as it once was ;-)), and construct a skeleton of Guide:: distributions based on the old modules list.
But first, back to reinventing some more wheels ;-). -- Sam Vilain, sam /\T vilain |><>T net, PGP key ID: 0x05B52F13 (include my PGP key ID in personal replies to avoid spam filtering)
