NEILB's Blog

For a while now I've been wanting a dashboard for my CPAN distributions, which would show me information pulled from various sources, and list them in an order related to how much stuff I need to do. I've created a very rough first cut — here are some dashboards: NEILB, BOOK, TOBYINK, KENTNL. Suggestions very welcome, as I'd like to play with this at the QA Hackathon later this week.

I first started wanting something like this when generating the summary tables at the head of each of my module reviews (which I need to get back to!).

If you look at my dashboard, you see some things highlighted in orange, and some in red. These indicate things that could be improved. For example the owner of one dist is ambiguous, but different people are owners of the modules it contains.

The dists are scored in a similar way to the adoption list, with the rating column on the right being the overall rating. By default the table is sorted on this column, but you can click on the heading of any column to sort by that instead. Click again to reverse the order.

There's a lot more that needs doing. For a start (thanks to OALDERS for some of these):

• Include release date.
• Link to github repo, if there is one (flag if there isn't).
• License (-1 if not specified in metadata).
• Any pod errors.
• Test coverage would be nice, but I'm pretty sure there aren't any services out there doing that, so maybe you'd have to generate the dashboard locally for that?
• Perl::Critic results. Trouble is this would either have to be a subset that everyone could agree with, or (a) you run it locally, or (b) for this to run you have to provide the config you expect to be clean under.
• Any pull requests outstanding?
• Factor in number of likes on MetaCPAN.
• As with the adoption list, more heavily weight a dist that has dependent dists (by another author).
• Tune weighting on CPAN Testers. As DAGOLDEN previously pointed out, need a more balanced consideration of the CPAN Testers results.
• Better presentation / formatting of the kwalitee data. Thinking it would be nice to show a mini version of the color bars including on the author pages.
• Is the module deprecated. Don't worry so much if it is.
• Core module or not.
• Tune the rating.
• If you have a recent developer and non-developer release for a dist, maybe show both?

I wouldn't have released such an early version, but I wanted to get something out before the QA Hackathon. I think something like this would be good to have in MetaCPAN, and I'm going to be talking to Olaf about the adoption list anyway, so wanted to throw this into the mix, as they both will use some of the same data.

The core of the dashboard is constructued with CPAN::Dashboard; you can see how the rating is calculated in CPAN::Dashboard::Distribution.