For a little while, I’ve been curious about which of the packages people in the vast wasteland of CPAN actually use and care about. Here’s an attempt to answer that question with fifty popular Perl packages for your entertainment.
Before we begin, a brief overview of the column layout.
- The mean vote from CPAN ratings.
- The number of votes for that package registered at CPAN ratings.
- The number of “vote” entries registered at the Debian popularity contest. This is approximately the number of people who currently use a package.
My ranking attempts to balance people’s votes against a package’s practical utility using a metric composed of equal parts baffling complexity and utter nonsense.
4.7 29 20962 DBI 5.0 2 45321 Text-Iconv 5.0 6 11507 HTML-Tree 4.8 5 14372 HTML-Parser 5.0 2 15132 Gtk2 4.8 4 9125 XML-Twig 5.0 1 17281 URI 4.8 10 1880 XML-Simple 4.4 18 2295 HTML-Template 4.7 3 5679 Net-DNS 5.0 4 2113 BerkeleyDB 4.0 4 19845 DBD-mysql 5.0 3 2586 Error 4.3 3 9365 TimeDate 5.0 3 2134 Crypt-SSLeay 4.4 9 2324 XML-LibXML 4.7 3 3464 XML-SAX 4.8 12 654 WWW-Mechanize 4.5 2 6297 IO-Zlib 4.8 5 1321 Config-IniFiles 4.6 8 796 Mail-Sendmail 3.8 6 6032 XML-Parser 4.7 7 641 Params-Validate 4.7 3 1457 HTML-TableExtract 4.0 7 2509 File-Temp 5.0 1 2479 XML-LibXML-Common 3.7 6 6322 Archive-Tar 5.0 5 488 Email-Valid 4.6 11 427 MIME-Lite 5.0 1 2371 Date-Manip 4.0 2 8022 Compress-Zlib 4.8 5 614 Parse-Yapp 5.0 1 2225 IO-Socket-SSL 4.0 1 15146 Cairo 5.0 3 707 Text-Template 5.0 1 2108 Net-CIDR-Lite 4.8 8 360 Path-Class 4.9 9 269 HTML-Mason 4.7 19 175 Spreadsheet-WriteExcel 5.0 2 911 HTML-Format 3.8 6 3167 Archive-Zip 4.1 8 1142 Parse-RecDescent 4.3 3 1937 IO-String 4.0 3 3585 Net-Server 4.3 3 1838 Class-Accessor 5.0 3 539 Cache-Cache 4.1 9 868 DBD-Pg 5.0 1 1555 AppConfig 5.0 2 773 Time-modules 4.4 12 318 File-Find-Rule
Cool list. Looks a lot like the Phalanx 100 from a few years ago.
http://perlbuzz.com/2008/02/popular-perl-packages-in-debian.html
CPAN ratings does not mean much. Some use it instead of bug tracker (CPAN has rt.cpan.org). Many votes are cast many years ago – distrubution may have been completely transformed.
LWP (libwww-perl) is missing; that is probably a mistake.