On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 12:54:36AM +0900, Tom Copeland wrote:
> On Apr 13, 2009, at 10:40 AM, Mark Thomas wrote:
>
>> There's no doubt that CPAN is a great resource. These are a few of its
>> highlights:
>> 1. A single, cohesive website that categorizes all modules (http://
>> search.cpan.org/) for easy browsing.
>> 2. A module namespace convention that helps one know what the module
>> does, rather than 'cute' names (Test::MockClass vs. Mocha,
>> PDF::ReportWriter vs. prawn, etc)
>> 3. A search engine that returns not only description, but also last
>> update, and reviews. (e.g. http://search.cpan.org/search?query=xml)
>> 4. Page for each distribution with links to the classes and files,
>> dependencies, test results, etc. (Example: http://search.cpan.org/dist/XML-Twig-3.32/)
>> Much better interface than Rubyforge.
>> 5. Automated tests run by a cadre of volunteers. New releases of
>> modules are tested upon release on a variety of Perl versions and
>> operating systems. See the test reports and Perl/Platform Version
>> Matrix links on the distribution page.
>> 6. Ratings. When there are many options for a particular task, seeing
>> the star ratings can help you whittle down the options to the best.
>> The overall highest rated modules tend to be the best-practice ones
>> you should be using.
>> 7. The 'cpan' command comes with Perl. :)
>> 8. The 'cpan' command has a test harness and runs the tests before
>> installation. If a module doesn't pass its tests on your platform, it
>> is not installed.
>> 9. CPAN has a very rich set of mirrors (http://mirrors.cpan.org/) and
>> you can configure your local cpan command to use a subset, say a
>> primary and a backup (good for environments requiring firewall rules
>> to be in place for external access).
>
> That's a good list of features, thanks for putting it together.  Let's  
> see:
>
> 1.  Tricky one since there's more than one big source of gems.  Well,  
> there are two main ones - github and gems.rubyforge.org - plus a host of 
> others.  We could build such a site for RubyForge... would be  
> interesting.
>
> 2.  RubyForge has a "trove" that lets folks categorize their projects... 
> we could work this into a new site somehow.
>
> 3.  This would be nice indeed.
>
> 4.  Same as # 3 :-).  A lot of this information is there in the gem spec 
> or inside the gem itself; would need to extract and render it.
>
> 5.  Not sure if there's an effort like this going on anywhere in the  
> Ruby world.
>
> 6.  Could work this into RubyForge somehow if folks found it useful.
>
> 7.  I think RubyGems is shipping with newer versions of Ruby (?)
>
> 8.  This is something for Eric/Luis/other RubyGem guys to weigh in on... 
> surely this has come up before...

Number 8 already exists:  gem install whatever -t

-- 
Aaron Patterson
http://tenderlovemaking.com/