* David Golden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-03-26T16:59:26] > 1) Distributions can't be uniquely identified without an author name. > For example: > > cpan://dist/Foo-Bar/1.23
Good catch. > 2) dists may or may not even contain modules -- they could just contain > scripts. I'm not sure this is relevant, yet. I mean, it means that things won't show up in 02packages, but that's not the end of the world. If a dist has no indexed packages, you can fall back to cpan://id/AUTHOR/... -- and if (1) above is a big problem, you'll have to anyway. > 3) version numbers have no easy standards given what's out there in > the wild. Consider for example: > [...] > I'm not even sure if CPAN::DistnameInfo really handles all the odd > cases well, but it's probably pretty close to a standard for what can > be done. This problem basically *has* to be a 90% solution. It sucks, but since $VERSION can be set to any old crazy thing, it's what we have to live with. > 4) packages with arbitrary version numbers can't be mapped to a > distribution unless it appears in 02packages.txt (latest non-developer > version). If the latest Foo::Bar is 1.23, there's no way to tell what > distribution tarball contains Foo::Bar 1.22. Dieter was working on a backpan index, and I know Leon has one, and BDFOY has also said he's worked on one. If it's Reliable Enough, there's that, but point taken. > A) package names > > B1) author/distname-version > B2) author/distname/version I think B1 is best dropped, because someday some jerk will upload Foo-Bar-1-2.tar.gz, version 2 of Foo-Bar-1 containing Foo::Bar:1, and now what does author/Foo-Bar-1 mean? Do we then want: 1. cpan://package/Your::Face 2. cpan://dist/HDP/Your-Face 3. cpan://dist/HDP/Your-Face/0.01 4. cpan://file/HDP/Your-Face-0.01.tar.gz (4) means that you can't use cpan:// to find a non-author file, like 02packages itself. There could be //file and //userfile. Or something. (2) would refer to the dist per se, not anything like "latest version" I agree, though, that 2 and 3 have their own problems. If the backpan indexing is a success, then we may end up with: 1. cpan://package/Your::Face 2. cpan://package/Your::Face/0.01 3. cpan://file/HDP/Your-Face-0.01.tar.gz If the backpan indexing is a success, then possibly it can be made possible to allow "install Your::Face 0.01" to force and old version from the backpan. -- rjbs
