Well, I don't support removing anything out of the core, for reasons of backwards compatibility. But, yes, for most of modules you list, I agree they should never have been in the core.

As for your list, not all the modules you mention are part of the core. LWP for instance is not part of the core - but that's one module I think should belong in the core, if only for the fact it's CPAN.pm's preference. For the same reason, I don't object against the presence of Net::* (which, BTW, is only a recent addition to the core). CGI::* and HTML::* don't belong in the core IMO. Neither do URI::* or HTTP::*, unless LWP would depend on them (if LWP would be in the core).

The Class::* modules shouldn't be in the core. They don't fit any criteria I mentioned above. OTOH, modules like File::Spec and File::Basename, and probably more of the File::* modules are used when installing perl and modules. IPC:: can stay as well, as it's tied to core features.

I consider List::Util and Scalar::Util to be borderline cases. They are heavily tied to perl internals, and could be quite version dependent. OTOH, the same argument could be made for several Devel:: modules, and they live happily on CPAN as well.

Math:: has no reason to be in the core (other than historical reasons). It lives independently on CPAN as well. Same with Memoize.

DBMs and DB_Files have a long history. DBM support dates from before perl5, and perl5 still supports 'dbmopen' and friends as core features.

Search::Dict doesn't belong in the core, IMO. Text::* modules only for where they are needed to support the POD tools.

The Win32 module isn't part of the Perl core (it says so in the POD). I wouldn't put the POD in the Perl core either. WWW::RobotsRules isn't in the core either.

but also what they would consider to be "core".

I think this discussion is only relevant if we consider the "core" to be what's distributed in the perl-$VERSION.tar.gz file. That is, the file that's made public by one of the current pumpkings.

Abigail

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