Friday, July 01, 2005

Annotating CPAN

Even the language's fiercest critics will usually acknowledge that CPAN is Perl's biggest advantage over the other high level languages like Python and Ruby. However, as for most open source projects, at times the documentation for some modules can be fairly thin on the ground.

However I've just stumbled across an article by Ivan Tubert-Brohman, published today, where he talks about his latest project AnnoCPAN which allows anyone to post public annotations in the margins of the module documentation.

I'm really excited about this, as it could be an amazingly useful tool if used correctly. I know there has been many occasions where I've struggled with a module interface, only to finally figure out that the code and the POD only bear a passing resemblance to each other. In these cases the module author is sometimes pretty unresponsive about fixing things, so it would be nice to be able to tell people about the problems with the relevant modules. Hopefully AnnoCPAN can solve this problem...

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