From: Gavin Sinclair Date: 2003-01-25T00:25:46+09:00 Subject: Re: Can we attack the 'not enough libraries' thing straight on? On Saturday, January 25, 2003, 1:18:03 AM, Hiroshi wrote: >> 1) Find a more accessible domain name. www.ruby-lang.org/raa is not as >> easy to remember as www.cpan.org. Unfortunatelly >> (ruby|cran|raa).(org|net) are all taken. > How do you feel raa.ruby-lang.org ? It's logical and compelling. >> 3) RAA is hard to browse. I think that a setup of the style of >> www.search.cpan.org is best. > I don't use CPAN modules so I seldom use CPAN search... > What is the most significant point of all the features which > CPAN search have and RAA don't have, do you think? We'll > change it better and better untill RAA.succ comes. I never use it, but in order to justify this "me too"-ish post, I did my bit and tried to answer your question anyway :) search.cpan.org provides the following features: 1. Clear enumeration of categories up front In contrast to RAA's very hierachical structure, CPAN seems to be organised around 26 categories. When I used to use it, I actually found it confusing, as I roughly knew what I was looking for, but couldn't decide which of 2 or 3 categories was the most logical place to find it. So I used it for browsing, but was never convinced that it all made sense. 2. Search options (search in modules, distros, or authors, or all) Pretty straightforward really. RAA's not so big that it needs this. Search all works fine. 3. Browse by author Good idea, but annoyingly over-hypertext. I want to browse all authors on one page, with an index up the top using anchors. This forces you onto a different page for each author. I'd like this feature in RAA. 4. Recent updates Browse the last 7 days of "uploads". I hate arbitrary limits - why not allow you to go further back. But it's good anyway. RAA should allow you to view "recent updates" separately from "recent additions", but I've carped on about that enough and you've agreed to support it in future. \(^o^)/ 5. About/Mirrors/Feedback Various meta-information/services. 6. FAQ RAA should have one, including plans for future updates. So I dug into a search to see what functionality I could find. I searched for MIDI in Modules and got 33 results. (MIDI in all got 413 or something. Go figure.) Good feature: change the number of entries per page. The output is nice and neat; RAA could take an example here. Bad feature: it's not well organised. Several results seem related. They are not all top-level modules; some are bits of modules, or something. E.g. MIDI, MIDI::Event, MIDI::Opus, MIDI::Score and more (all by the same author) are separate search results! So much for the 33 different MIDI modules I expected! That concludes my tour of search.cpan.org. I don't see any killer feature in it that puts any daylight between it and RAA, just a more professional look and a few little things. I've said it before, but the last major update to RAA was a quantum leap, and the whole community applauds your efforts (^^)// so the pace of improvement is already very good. Cheers, Gavin PS. See http://club.pep.ne.jp/~hiroette/en/facemarks/index.html for the great Japanese smileys!