[tpm] This month's meeting

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all,

On Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:08:43 -0500
Olaf Alders <olaf.alders at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On 2013-01-24, at 2:38 PM, Dave Doyle wrote:
> 
> > Sadly, I won't be there this month or next but I thought I'd mention:
> > 
> > On 24 January 2013 14:31, J. Bobby Lopez <jbl at jbldata.com> wrote:
> > 	• Although TMTOWTDI is something we encourage at the earliest
> > stages of learning, I think it would be beneficial for Perl veterans to
> > work closely to put together a bit of a "starter package", a list of
> > modules we would recommend to someone doing project of type X - e.g.:
> > Doing a web app?  Start with Dancer.  Need your app to send  e-mails?  Try
> > Email::Sender.. etc. This is something the Perl community has been thinking
> > about (I heard it discussed first I think at YAPC Columbus) and is
> > encapsulated in the phrase TWTOWTDI BSCINABTE (TimToady Bicarbonate):
> > There's more than one way to do it, but sometimes consistency is not a bad
> > thing either. I don't know that there's a formalized thing though.  Perhaps
> > we could brainstorm a way to come up with the default toolkit and a way to
> > keep it up to date.
> > 
> > And perhaps a way to stop people from killing one another when we say "use
> > this not this" (IE Dancer vs Mojolicious vs Catalyst) :)
> > 
> > There was a "Recommended Modules" on the old Perl5 Wiki but I don't know
> > that it's been kept up to date.
> 
> How about Task::Kenso?
> 
> https://metacpan.org/module/Task::Kensho
> 

Task::Kensho is nice. However, I should note that once (when the rethinking-cpan
effort was started by Andy Lester, and somewhat before the failed CPANHQ
project started, which was followed by the much more fruitful and
successful MetaCPAN), and we started thinking about how to better find
something quickly on CPAN (or conclude that something up-to-date does not
exist), I contemplated creating something like of an “expert system” for CPAN,
that will ask questions and do recommendations. Something like:

* Hi, I'm the MetaCPAN's expert system. What do you want to do?

→ User Answer's: I want to process XML.

* Do you want to:

1. Emit XML?

2. Translate XML into a different format.

3. Parse XML?

→ User Answer's: 1. Emit XML.

* We recommend: XML-Writer. 

-----

But there are some issues with implementation, like how to allow users to
easily contribute (are GitHub pull requests enough), how to make sure it is
kept out-of-date, and possibly allow to CPAN authors and MetaCPAN visitors to
specify meta-data to populate it and keep it up-to-date. This may turn out like
the whole semantic desktop thing, which would have worked great, except that
people are not keen on adding meta-data to all the resources on their private
system, and normally prefer just doing filename searches or full text searches.

Given that it seems most CPAN authors did not bother adding tags/keywords to
their distribution's META.yml , I'm not sure how well a CPAN expert system can
be kept up-to-date and functional.

Naturally, this is kinda a "first-world problem" which is indicative that CPAN
has been successful and well, proven to be comprehensive, and now we are trying
to find the hidden gems among the lot of "noise". Not that I think that
having a "better" quality control over what gets uploaded to CPAN is a good
idea - see
http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/show.cgi?id=perl-petdance-thousand-flowers .

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish
 
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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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