[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Randy W. Sims) writes:I still think sourceforge-like hierchical catagories (Topics) in META.yml would make for good light-weight search and improved by-catagory browsing
I disagree quite violently with this, but I'm not going to implement searching and indexing in a way that precludes it. I think that the world moved from browse to search some time in the mid 90s (hell, we're even being encouraged to search rather than browse email these days) and that this is because browsing is useful if your search engine isn't good enough.
Ok. I'm not sure I completely agree, but I will conceed that a good search engine can accomplish simiar goals.
Even so, I recognise that everyone who comes to working on CPAN metadata has their own conceptual axe to grind, so I'll just index whatever the heck is in META.yml and let everone else sort out the details.
hmm, are you going to generate multiple indexes? It might be interesting if we could search over the various fields provided by META.yml[1]. For example, you might do a search for the term "process list" where the field Platform == MSWin32, or a module author might do a search where term is "*" (any) and field Requires == <one-of-authors-modules> to get a list of modules that depend on her module.
I'm not sure how widely usefull that would be, but it seems worth considering. However, some of the potentially usefull fields are currently not in use.[2]
1. Current and proposed spec at <http://module-build.sourceforge.net/>
2. Somewhat old data, but the fields in use should still be accurate. <http://www.thepierianspring.org/meta.stats> The script to generate it is at <http://www.thepierianspring.org/meta_stats.pl.html>
