On May 23, 2006, at 10:15 AM, H.Merijn Brand wrote:
is_prereq is usually a vote of confidence,
I respectfully disagree completely.
It's been more than once that I did *not* install a module because it
required a module that I did not trust, either because of (the
programming
style of) the author of that module, or because that module
required yet
another zillion things I do not want installed (think YAML).
I believe we are largely in agreement, but I think your example
demonstrates that you missed my point. As you well know, CPANTS is
not making recommendations whether a module is a good solution for
your problem, or whether you should trust a given module. Instead,
it is currently measuring maturity of a module and the author's
attention to detail. is_prereq just measures whether *any* other
humans trust the module in question. In that way, is_prereq is like
a simplistic binary version of Google's page rank. Just because
Google rates a page highly doesn't mean it's a good page. Similarly
just because CPANTS ranks a module highly doesn't mean it's a good
module. However, both is_prereq and page rank are among the current
best automatable proxies we have for approximating human judgment of
quality. Yes, there are great modules with is_prereq of 0 and there
are great web sites with low page ranks. But in both cases they're
harder to find than their highly-linked counterparts, except via word
of mouth (perlmonks, cpanratings, etc).
I keep advocating for is_prereq because currently it's the only non-
author-controlled input to CPANTS. That's it's primary value, and it
will continue to be important until some better proxy for human
confidence comes along, like incorporating cpanratings into CPANTS (I
do NOT advocate that!) or getting download stats from CPAN (never
gonna happen) or adding voluntary "Someone installed module X" pings
from CPAN.pm.
Chris
--
Chris Dolan, Software Developer, Clotho Advanced Media Inc.
608-294-7900, fax 294-7025, 1435 E Main St, Madison WI 53703
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Clotho Advanced Media, Inc. - Creators of MediaLandscape Software
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