This five minute presentation will step through a typical new user's
interaction with CPAN.
The principle finding is that search.cpan's navigation is lacking,
and the user's typical task's of finding, evaluating, downloading, and installing
Perl modules could benefit from additional affordances and navigation aids.
It's worth taking a little time to poke around the regions of the CPAN.
Think of it as a game of rogue or hack; roaming around a labyrinth,
looking for unexpected treasure.
Damian Conway, p66 (sect. 2.3.1) of Object Oriented Perl
Any contributed scripts must therefore follow certain rules:
They must not use any non-standard Perl modules. I know this is a bit
contentious, but I really think that the target audience will have
problems installing modules from CPAN.
Dave Cross, from the introduction to nms.
The user's experience begins.
1. A user reads about some nifty technology, and supposes a Perl module
provides an available implementation.
Example a perl.com article mentions an RSS module.
Note: Perhaps Searching CPAN is Unusable is a more accurate
title of this talk as it concerns the seach experience specifically,
more than the general existence and collection of modules.