metacpan-web VS blogs.perl.org

In January 2018, I proposed a CPAN Butterfly Plan to convert Perl functionality to Raku as closely as possible to the original API. I stated this as a goal because Perl (as a programming language) is so much more than syntax alone. Ask anyone what Perl's unique selling point is, and they will most likely tell you it is CPAN.

MetaCPAN. There are a number of project in the Perl community. This is one of the most interesting ones. source code

Perl has numerous modules for practically everything. Try a search on https://metacpan.org for anything that takes your fancy.

I can point to the module library metacpan.org that has modules to do tons of different things -- I don't know what equivalent resouorce Python has.

A good place for this issue would be https://github.com/metacpan/metacpan-web

All language package index websites are a poor imitation of metacpan.org. Without a doubt it is the single best package website I have used for finding packages, reading docs, examples, version changes, source repo. Everybody should be shamelessly copying it.

While the indicates that this is a Windows-related thing, there are a number of packages on CPAN that are in the Win32 namespace, but also work on Linux. This one, it seems does not. It seems at least one of its dependencies, the Win32-API does not work on anything else besides Windows.

A Perl distribution is an archive of files that includes a Perl module. There are no official rules on what non-module files must be included in a distribution, but they often include (among other things) test scripts, a Makefile.PL, documentation, and the license. These distributions are commonly uploaded to CPAN, which is a place for Perl programmers to upload their Perl distributions for the purpose of sharing their code.

If there are modules being used, you can read their documentation using the perldoc command or looking online at https://metacpan.org

The nice thing about DEV is that I can republish the articles I published elsewhere (e.g. on PerlMaven, on Code-Maven, or blogs.perl.org), and also I can set the canonical URL of each article on DEV to the original one on my blog. That way I get the visitors on DEV as well, but the 'Google juice' the articles receive will flow over to my sites. It seems like a win-win for DEV and authors who have blogs elsewhere. You can even configure DEV to pull your RSS feed and create drafts from your articles published elsewhere. I even started to republish the content of the Perl Weekly.

That kind of solution has been up and running on the site for maybe as much as 15 months. (For context, the site has been under my stewardship only since March 2020.) Only, it’s insufficient: it works maybe 80%, but was broken in not just subtle ways. (#415 is the least of them, though the most obvious.)

Interesting thread.

Maybe take a look at this GitHub issue to catch up on what has been going on in that area. In particular, the comments from ap explain why it's not as simple as you might think it is.

If your motivation is to improve the public image of perl in general, then consider that for many questions, perl monks, a site that didn't look good 20 years ago, ranks high in search results. Never mind that the regulars on that site are not exactly inviting either. For blog posts, it's blogs.perl.org, which doesn't even have https in this day and age. My point being that if sites like these are still coming up in search results, it doesn't really matter how good metacpan looks.

Check out blogs.perl.org for tidbits other Perl people find interesting.

There's already an issue about this. I guess you could ask there to see what the current situation is.