[Pdx-pm] ANNOUNCEMENT: PLUG Advanced Topics Meeting Wed Sept 17th 2008

[Alan]

PLUG Advanced Topics Meeting

Date:	Wednesday September 17th, 2008
Time:   7:00pm - ~9:00pm 

Location:  Jax Bar
           826 SW 2nd Ave 
           Portland, OR 97204-3089
           http://www.jaxbar.com/

Speaker:   brian d foy <brian at stonehenge.com>

Topic:     Indexing CPAN

BackPAN is the historical archive of the Comprehensive Perl Archive
Network, where most Perl modules live. Going back to 1993, BackPAN has
about 100,000 distributions, taking up 12 GB of space. So far, there
has not been a comprehensive index of all of these distributions. I'm
working on a project to go through each distribution, record as much
information as I can, and store that in a way that other people can
ask questions. The big goal now is to take any Perl module file you
have installed locally and query my index to determine exactly which
distribution it came from, when it was released, what other files came
with it, and at the time of it's release what its dependency list was.

My talk is a demonstration of what I have so far, which is still in
the data collection phase. I have an indexer that knows how to go
through distributions and record information, and can do some with
pluggable components for each portion of the work. In my talk, I'll
demonstrate the current indexer and talk a little bit about the tools
and techniques I use. There's plenty of cool Perl things going on, and
I'm sure some of the Linux people will have valuable comments about
software indexing.