http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=96951


in reply to Re: this place should define a relation to CPAN soon
in thread this place should define a relation to CPAN soon

I've hesitated posting here since I've recently made an ass of myself, but here 'ya go ...

I think that two valid points have been brought up in this thread. The first is that code posted to CPAN should be of a specific quality. As HyperZonk said, at best our is of "Beta" quality. This, to my mind, is not appropriate material to be posted to CPAN. There is some really good code here, but I wouldn't want the responsibility of having my own code that I post here be available for public consumption as with CPAN.

The implicit sense of responsilibity that comes from authoring something that's available for download might in fact cause a decrease in the amount of snippets that are available here. A person (me, for example ... though in my case this might be a good thing) might think twice about posting something if that code were instantly availible by the amount of people who hit download sites like CPAN. Like I said, those people are expecting a certain code-quality that isn't implied here.

The second point relates to the first: we need a mechanism that is relatively nonobtrusive; something not too different from the format we have now; what people are used to. If an extra burden is placed on people for formatting, pod'ing, whatever, it won't be a smooth or easy transition; and many just won't do it.

What we really need, I think, is some intelligent node-crawlers; a new SuperSuperSearch that is specifically designed to trawl though nodes looking for <code> tags, and the stuff between them.

Some of the best code around here are snippets, things like Japhy's response to a post of mine

sub union { my %seen; @seen{@$_} = () for @_; return keys %seen; } sub intersection { my %seen; for (@_) { $seen{$_}++ for @$_ } return grep $seen{$_} == @_, keys %seen; }

This is the type of code that we should be concerned about being found. Unfortunately to do that, we need to come up with a method of cataloging and searching the code.

Something we can start easily enough with is to catalog by function name. That combined with a full-text search of the node (and possibly the entire thread) should turn up quite a few hits; especially since most people give their example subs logical and descriptive names (like, ahem, Japhy's above-quoted example). Adding the ability to search in ## Comments for text seperately than function name searching would be a really good method, I think.

So, what I'm saying is that we should think not off adding an outside (CPAN) method of accessing our code, but instead create a local method of searching it.

And after all, isn't that the True Way of a Monestary? Isn't there some sort of implied rule that you must be willing to look for the answer before receiving it? I've never known Librarian-monks to ask for outside help in cateloging their books :)

mr.nick ...