CPAN: January 2008 Archives

When you're releasing a module, please show a sample use or the output somewhere in the documentation so that people like me who are interested in your module can have some idea of what it looks like and how I'd use it.

I take for example this new distro, pfacter, which purports to "Collect and display facts about the system." Sounds great, but how do I use it? I see a little program. Can I see some sample output? Please? There's nothing in the README or any kind of synopsis that shows it.

Of course, I don't mean to pick on this one distro. It's just the one that disappointed me just now and made me post this. It's something that has always frustrated me, especially as I try to find cool new modules to mention here or over in Mechanix.

(No need to point out that I haven't do this for ack myself. It's on my todo. :-) )

I've got so many little notes that don't warrant a full-blown story, so here's a link roundup:

• Perlcast interviews Curtis Poe about logic programming and Prolog. Is Fluffy a mammal?
• Adam Kennedy provides a mathematical proof that Perl is unparseable.
• chromatic is tracking down memory leaks in Parrot (but if you follow rakudo.org, you already know that).
• David Landgren has posted another of his marvelous Perl 5 Porters weekly mailing list summaries. If you want to know what's happening in Perl 5.10 (and 5.12) development, but can't handle the volume and/or high-level discussion, David's summaries are the place to go.
• Andy Armstrong has performed magic to let you instrument your Perl code with dtrace.

There, that feels much better now!