perlmeditation moritz <p>You'd like to learn perl a bit better, but missing a cool and useful idea? Or just want to gather a bit of fame in the Perl community?</p> <p>Here are a few project ideas that I'd would like to see implemented, and that seem interesting enough for me to implement them. When I have time, which is the caveat - I won't get around to them in the near future.</p> <p>Enough teasing, here's the list</p> <ul> <li>Popularity Contest for CPAN Modules</li> <li>Offline Command Line Search for CPAN</li> <li>Which tests matter?</li> <li>Binary CPAN mirror</li> </ul> <p>They are all related to the perl+CPAN infrastructure, and need perl's facility as a glue language.</p> <readmore> <h2>Popularity Contest</h2> <p>So you wrote a CPAN module, and after a few weeks you're a bit disappointed - all smokes are green, you've got one or two ratings, but still you have no idea how many people actually use your module. Or at least have it installed.</p> <p>[http://www.debian.org/|Debian] has a (partial) solution for this, named "Popularity Contest", short popcon. They offer a package which runs a cron job once a week, and reports (anonymously) via email which packages are installed, and (if this information is available) if they were used.</p> <p>I'd like to see something similar for CPAN distributions. I wouldn't send emails (because not everybody has a mail server installed) but rather report via HTTP POST requests.</p> <p>I could argue about usefulllness, for example for perl distributors who want to decide what to deliver by default. But mostly I'm just curious about the results.</p> <h2>Offline Command Line Search for CPAN</h2> <p>I'm one of these unfortunate people who are offline rather often, and of course my best ideas come when I can't search CPAN to find out if somebody did the hard 90% of the work already. Also I just don't like to be forced to use a browser for any task. Plain [mod://CPAN] and [mod://CPANPLUS] can only search in module and distribution names.</p> <p>That's why I'd like to have a command line utility that searches the POD documentation, for example using the excellent [mod://KinoSearch] module. Let's assume there's already a [mod://CPAN::Mini] mirror available...</p> <h2>Which tests matter?</h2> <p>The other day a fellow Perlmonger told me about a problem of his: Some of his modules have quite extensive test suites that need to be maintained. Over time they assemble some duplicated tests, and removing them would ease the maintenance burden.</p> <p>There are two nice ideas how to find out which tests matter, both of them involving [mod://Devel::Cover].</p> <p>The first is to run each test separately with Devel::Cover, identify which statements and branches are covered, and then search for test files which don't test anything that is also tested elsewhere.</p> <p>The second sounds less efficient, but more fun: nuke each test file in turn (and restore the previously nuked), run Devel::Cover and see if the coverage has changed. You can use some evolutionary algorithms to optimize removal of multiple test files.</p> <h2>Binary CPAN Mirror</h2> <p>I love CPAN, but I use Linux with a package management system and CPAN ignores that. It installs to <c>/usr/local/</c> so it's not that bad, but I'd like it better if I could install all CPAN packages with my package management system (in this case apt).</p> <p>I can build Debian packages from CPAN packages with <c>dh-make-perl</c>, but it always takes some time, and I have to check (and follow) the dependencies manually.</p> <p>So what I'd like to have (or build) is a CPAN mirror that automatically builds binary packages from CPAN tar balls.</p> <p>This is a non-trivial taks because non-perl dependencies aren't encoded in a cross-platform and machine readable format in CPAN packages, but a partial solution for pure-perl only modules would still be formidable.</p> </readmore> <p>So if you that inspired you, feel free to implement any of them (or tell me that there already is a solution), or go on and write about your own cool perl project ideas.</p> <p>(Update: fixed a few typos, [Corion]++ and [Arunbear]++)