what is your general apprach to choose the "canonical" package for a jog. I.e. the package that "everybody is using". Is there any rating or popularity billboard somewhere?
When I want to pick which of several CPAN modules to use, the things I look at are
Documentation:
The litmus test for CPAN modules is the first page of the documentation. If there is a messy synopsis, or a synopsis without a simple working example, I guess that the module is probably not a good one. Untidy, messy, or misformatted documentation is also a red flag.
State of repair:
- the date of release of the last version of the module tells you if it is being maintained,
- the CPAN tester's reports tell you whether the module is likely to install without a struggle
- the bugs list on rt.cpan.org gives you some idea of how active the author is about maintaining the module.
Also, is there a mailing list for the module? Having a mailing list is a pretty good sign of a good-quality, maintained, stable, documented and popular module.
Author:
- What is the name of the module author?
- How many other modules has the author released?
- What kind of modules has the author released?
The author is a big factor. There are some authors who create things which have excellent quality, like Gisle Aas, Graham Barr, Andy Wardley, or Jan DuBois, and some people who turn out a lot of things which could be described as "experimental", like Damian Conway or Tatsuhiko Miyagawa. Be wary of people who've released a lot of Acme:: (joke) modules. Also, beware of things written by people who only maintain one or two modules. People who have fewer than five modules in total usually don't maintain them.
Other things:
cpanratings.perl.org is often helpful, but take it with a grain of salt.
Apart from that, a lot of it is just trial and error. Download and see if it passes its own tests, see if it even has any tests, write a test script, etc.
Things which often don't give a meaningful ranking:
- The top results on Google tend to be ancient Perlmonks or perl.com or Dr. Dobbs' Journal articles, and these often point you towards outdated things.
- search.cpan.org's search function puts modules which haven't been updated for ten years on page one, and the latest and greatest on page ten or something.
Beware of "hype":
One more thing I want to say: Be wary of advice on blogs, stackoverflow, Usenet news, etc. - people tend to guide you to whatever module happens to be flavour of the month, rather than a stable, proven solution. The "trendy" modules usually lack documentation, are unstable, have nightmarish dependencies, and quite often yesterday's fashionable modules suddenly fall out of favour and are abandoned, to be replaced by another flavour of the month, leaving you in the lurch if you decide to use them.
