On Fri, 25 Nov 2005 09:55:00 +1100, Alfie John wrote:
> On 24/11/2005, at 9:37 PM, Peter Haworth wrote:
> >>> On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, C. Garrett Goebel wrote:
> >>> CGG>CPAN being what it is... how do you suggest someone find
> >>> CGG>modules which bill themselves as PBP conformant?
> >
> > How about bundles? There could be a separate Bundle::PBP::category
> > for each category that we care to recommend modules in. Since
> > bundles are essentially just documentation, there's plenty of
> > scope for including explanations, comparisons, non-
> > recommendations, etc.
>
> Usually when I go to CPAN, I am there to get a module and use it. I
> have no intention of pulling it apart.

The point of the bundle wouldn't be to install the whole bunch of
modules, although it could be used that way. The idea is really just
to make the recommended modules easy to find using something like
search.cpan.org. Once you've read the bundle documentation, you should
have an idea about why you'd want to install the recommended module
rather than one of its competitors. Having identified a suitable
module, it's up to you how you install it.

> I think that having a PBP namespace for the sake of having a
> namespace is kind of silly. Just because it follows a BP doesn't
> mean it works!

The thing about modules in the Bundle::PBP namespace is that they
would be maintained separately from the modules they recommend.
Ideally, such recommendations would come from trustworthy members of
this list or some similar forum, but there's nothing in the PAUSE/CPAN
infrastructure to prevent anyone from creating a bundle recommending
the crappy module they wrote themselves.

> Maybe what is needed is a new option in 'make dist' when building
> distributions to show that it follows *a* PBP?

The only way to find PBP-compliant modules in the current system is
for them to include something searchable in their documentation. We
could attempt to get authors to standardize on a suitable word which
didn't have other usages, but I don't think it would be very
successful.

-- 
	Peter Haworth	pmh@edison.ioppublishing.com
"[That sentence] occupied the table running through the middle of the middle
room in a half-way house. It was so equidistant that it managed to find a patch
of gravitic stability, a Lagrange of Reason, within which it set up a giant
tubular space station of the type that NASA were hoping to build by 2010."
		-- Ashley Pomeroy