On Saturday, November 27, 2004, at 11:25 PM, Terrence Brannon wrote:
However, there is little on CPAN to group a collection of related modules. I often spend time trying to get author a and author b to add each other to their SEE ALSO section. [...] Ideally the overarching theme(s) behind a module might be browseable along with the module itself: you search for DBIx::DBO2 and up comes DBIx::Wrapper::Evaluation for you to peruse a "Consumer Reports" evaluation of DBIx::DBO2 along with DBIx::Easy, etc...
I like this idea, but I don't think it's a good fit for the "magazine" model.
If you're going to post that kind of guide on CPAN, I think it would benefit from being like the POOP-Group summary, which is updated over time and accepts patches from contributors, rather than being like a magazine article with the opinion of one person which is published one time and not maintained.
As a concrete example, "A Guide to Method Generator Modules" sounds like a good subject for a CPAN-published manpage, but "Terrence Is Not Impressed By Mason AutoHandlers" would be better off published in another channel.
- What choices would lead authors to submit an article to this forum, rather than to the current choices, like Perl Monks, Perl Review, Perl.com, etc?
I think it boils down to how you like to author things and how much peer-review you want. I don't like HTML authoring so much. Writing something for intensive peer review is good, but I prefer something along the lines of comp.lang.perl.moderated in terms of how much scrutiny I want.
I think the fact that you're going to publish on CPAN is an argument for much more peer review than if you were posting to c.l.p.m or PerlMonks; you're asking hundreds of sites to mirror your article for years and years, and the only way people can effectively respond is by publishing their own article as Software::Design::HTML::Mason::autohandler_vs_perl_oop_heres_what_I_thin k.
We also have the option of packaging working code with our articles. The HTML::Mason::vs_perl_oop distribution had working pure Perl to emulation Mason autohandling. That is easy with CPAN publishing.
You can also include source code (or a link to a tarball) with an article submitted to c.l.p.m or any of the web or paper magazines, without worrying about CPAN accidentally indexing your examples (eg, modules like Huffy::Base).
On Sunday, November 28, 2004, at 07:29 AM, Terrence Brannon wrote:
I have supported those channels and intend to in the future... when I get some spare time, which might not be for another 10 years.
Being the editor of a magazine seems like a larger commitment than writing an occasional article. (You could try asking some of the various people who've worked on past and present Perl magazines about their experiences.) If your time is so limited, I would worry that you'd only get around to publishing a few "issues", which wouldn't really serve the community.
CPAN [...] can be used and abused in a variety of ways based on who decides to get involved with it.
Yes -- and part of that framework is that the people who are heavily involved with it are expected to speak up against the abuses. Feel free to "abuse" software, but don't please actually abuse the community.
(I could publish a daily blog about what I had for dinner as CPAN modules, Simon's::Dinner::Fajitas_11_28_2004, Simon's::Dinner::Lasagna_11_29_2004, and so on -- but that'd be abusive, and one would expect that the community would provide negative feedback.)
I really like the way that CPAN goes from general to specific when naming a module. Most magazines publish articles with freeform titles. By strictly following naming conventions, we develop a collection of writings on a particular topic or CPAN module available in a single place.
This makes some sense as an indexing and cataloging technique -- creating a well-named manpage that directs users to information scattered in other locations that they might not otherwise find -- but there's no need to publish hundreds of short essays of individual author's opinions this way.
So, if you want to undertake a community effort to build and publish a DBIx::WrapperGuide manpage, I'd be all for it and glad to help -- it can replace the crufty one I put together earlier this year:
http://search.cpan.org/dist/DBIx-SQLEngine/SQLEngine/Docs/Related.pod
But as to Software::Design::HTML::Mason::autohandler_vs_perl_oop, I remain unconvinced that this belongs on CPAN -- why not post this on PerlMonks instead, where lots of people who use Mason have an opportunity to comment?
-Simon
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