Due to what I call creative laziness, which Larry calls the virtue of
laziness, I am working on a module to manipulate phone numbers ready to
hand them off to a telephone dialer such as a modem. For example, it will
detect whether a fully qualified phone number is a local call, and strip
off the area code for you if it is. Then I can store fully qualified phone
numbers in a database, and manipulate them according to locale each time I
dial one. Great for laptop owners or people who move a lot.
I may also pursue a new mime type, so that you can click on the telephone
number on a web page or HTML email (yucch), and your telephone will dial
it for you. (Outlook, of course, will have a special feature: it will dial
a number without your knowledge or permission, because you're too ignorant
to know whether to dial it or not ;-) That's for later on. But it would be
convenient if the mime types mirrored the perl namespace usage.
This is my first effort at a perl module. I have a number of questions for
you.
* Name Space usage: I have searched
http://www.cpan.org/modules/00modlist.long.html, and don't see any
evidence that anyone is using the namespaces "Phone" "Telephone" or
"Phonenumber". Due to the facts that 1) phone numbers in different
countries use different formatting conventions, and 2) I'm not going to
research them all, I'd like to leave room in the namespace for other
countries or geographic areas as well. So my tentative name for the
module I am working on, for North American phone numbers (US, Canada,
portions of Mexico and the Caribbean) is Phone::NA. Phone::NorthAmerican
might be clearer.
I'd also like to leave room for other uses of the Phone name spaces,
such as a telephone number database or a PBX interface, similar to
Microsoft's TAPI stuff or other telephony tricks. So possibly I should
use the Phone::Numbers name space for number twiddlers like mine, and
leave Phone for other telephone related modules. Any suggestions?
* I have installed modules, but never built one. Has anyone got a
step-by-step how-to? Or shall I just reverse engineer what other folks
have done and experiment?
* I am not on Usenet at all. How badly do I need comp.lang.perl.modules or
any other news groups? Or are they available as lists? Is there an
archive?
The DSLI values for this module are probably: D:c S:d L:p I:f. Not that
I've register with the Perl Authors Upload Server (PAUSE) yet.
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