Digging CPAN

I have been silent for a long time due to too much work on one hand and a long vacation on the other. In between the two I squeezed in a little bit of coding to make my little project usable. At least I try to make it work for myself.

The web site is called CPAN::Digger (cpandigger.org). It is a site to collect and display some information about CPAN modules and other Perl code. It is at a very early and ugly version but some of you might find it useful.

The part that might be interesting for some people is that it is using PPI to collect data from the modules. It use the PPI based syntax highlighter that was originally written for Padre and it uses PPIx::EditorTools to generate a json file with the list of methods of each package. This is basically the outline view of Padre.

You can already see the results on the right hand side of this page (http://cpandigger.org/syn/Padre/lib/Padre.pm)

It also uses Perl::MinimumVersion to find out the minimum version of perl required by each module. These numbers are used to show what is the minimum version of perl each distribution requires.

Perl::Critic is also used on each module using level 4 criticism. It is very experimental. I think it will be interesting to see what issues are common to perl modules and maybe draw a conclusion regarding which policies are in consensus and which is not.

I hope some of these might be interesting to you too.

The source code is available on Github.

Comments, criticism, bug reports and patches are welcome!