Randy W. Sims wrote:
> On 12/8/2003 4:55 PM, Stas Bekman wrote:
> 
>> Graham Barr wrote:
>>
>>> On 8 Dec 2003, at 20:42, Stas Bekman wrote:
>>>
>>>> Also Graham, it'd be really nice to have search.cpan.org support 
>>>> 'exact match', many times I want to link to a module in the docs 
>>>> using search.cpan.org, and ?query=Foo::Bar is not the best choice as 
>>>> it gives you more than one matches most of the time and sometimes 
>>>> the right choice is not on the top. I think only when you say: 
>>>> ?query=Foo::Bar&mode=module it gives you that module first (e.g. 
>>>> search for CGI). But I want to be able to link directly to the 
>>>> latest version (that you get to after following one of the links 
>>>> from the search's output) and not search output.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> If you are trying to link to the POD of a module, then you should be 
>>> using /perldoc?CGI
>>
>>
>>
>> No, I want to be able to link to the distribution dir, e.g.:
>> http://search.cpan.org/~lds/CGI.pm-3.00/
>> without that -3.00 version in the path, so it'll always point to the 
>> latest distro.
>>
> 
> Actually, it does work <http://search.cpan.org/~lds/CGI.pm/>, or is this 
> not what you meant?

I didn't know that (it's not obvious). But what if the author changes? There 
should be a way to say that without including the author name.

Also CGI.pm is bad example, as it has .pm in its name and you need to know 
that its distro includes that .pm string. Let's take Apache::Request as a 
better example. I want to be able to say:

http://search.cpan.org/whatever?Apache::Request and expect to be taken to the 
distro dir that contains the latest version of the package, which is at the 
moment: http://search.cpan.org/~joesuf/libapreq-1.3/

So in documentation pods one can say something like:

   When you use Apache::Request
   (L<http://search.cpan.org/whatever?Apache::Request>) bla bla...

and the user clicking on this link will be taken to
http://search.cpan.org/~joesuf/libapreq-1.3/
and from there he can decide to read the docs or download the distro or do 
other things.

That URL in my docs will always work correctly even if the author or version 
numbers change.

I'd suggest that search.cpan.org will have a new option 'direct' in addition 
to module, dist, author and all. So that 
http://search.cpan.org/search?query=Apache::Request&mode=direct will take me 
direct to the distro containing this package?

__________________________________________________________________
Stas Bekman            JAm_pH ------> Just Another mod_perl Hacker
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