On Fri, Oct 09, 2009 at 08:21:30AM -0400, Hans Dieter Pearcey wrote: > Excerpts from David Golden's message of Fri Oct 09 07:55:12 -0400 2009: > > 30. Trove-Like Categories > > > > Proposal: > > > > Add Freshmeat.net or SourceForge-like trove categories with topics > > programming languages, etc. As opposed to keywords/labels/tags they are a > > nested tree, and will also be limited to a given list. This will help in > > being able to better browse CPAN instead of the old and heavily > > under-maintained long modules list. For example "Programming Language :: > > Lisp", "Intended Audience :: Emacs Users", "Operating System :: GNU", > > "Topic :: Editors". > > "Move the modules list into META files". No thanks.
The "Module List" (by which I mean the list of "registered" modules) is effectvely dead. Only a very small proportion of modules are registered. And yet the 'registered modules category' links, that form the bulk of the http://search.cpan.org/ home page, have over 22,000 page views a month![1] Those users are seeing a narrow and distored view of CPAN. I think it's important to fix this. So important that I'd be happy if those links were simply removed today. They're doing more harm than good right now. I don't have a strong opinion about Trove-Like Categories vs tags. Either would need careful thought about the human aspects of their use, from a lazy authors point of view. I'd also observe that categories could be implemented as 'machine tags' ala flikr [2] Tim. [1] According to google-analytics: "Unique Pageviews" of /modlist/... since Sept 8th. [2] http://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157594497877875/
