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Leo Lapworth edited this page Jun 21, 2013 · 24 revisions

What is MetaCPAN?

The CPAN is one of the best things about Perl. http://search.cpan.org goes a long way towards making the CPAN searchable, but it could be so much better. The code behind http://search.cpan.org is not open source (that we know of), so we're not able to contribute back to it. Instead of coding a replacement for search.cpan.org, we're proposing a free, open web service which will provide useful data about CPAN distributions, modules and authors.

Take http://cpanratings.perl.org as an example. There is no simple way (which we know of) to query a web service in order to get a module's rating. As it stands, you need to download a .csv file, parse it and then extract the data you're looking for. This would be much easier to use if you could simply query a web service, receive a JSON data structure and then be on your way.

Get to Know the Project

We're just in the very early stages, but if you want to play with it, check out the API documentation.

Installation

How to Install MetaCPAN

Upload author meta data

Screencast by szabgab

How to Upload Author Meta Data

Roadmap

Currently, MetaCPAN is developed as part of a Google Summer of Code project. The project'S roadmap can be found at https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/252059 (enable the ICEBOX to see upcoming tasks).

Please contribute to the spec on tagging.

Join the Discussion

You can also join us on our mailing list: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/metacpan (old list archive)

And on irc: #metacpan on irc.perl.org

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Getting Started

Initially this project was proposed as a web service which could be used specifically by iCPAN, an iPhone application which keeps an offline version of most CPAN modules. Here's a brief synopsis of what we were thinking.

Here's a loosely organized list of topics which merit further discussion:

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