The 'perl' dist documentation is a mess

[tobyink]

https://metacpan.org/release/perl

Out of all the releases on CPAN, this one seems like it could do with some special-casing to make the documentation list a little tidier.

Just adding a custom sort to the documentation list would be a big help. Documentation where the title matches /perl/ but not /perl(\d+)delta/ should be shown first, then documentation which matches /perl(\d+)delta/, then everything else. The delta documentation could also be sorted by version number.

[oalders]

Could use Sort::ByExample for this special case.

[tobyink]

https://gist.github.com/tobyink/2c41aa3a8b9b943996f80c58a2ffce06

[oalders]

@haarg thoughts on this?

[rjbs]

I brought this same complaint to IRC this week, without doing the courteous thing and first looking for a GitHub issue.

Toby is right: it's a real mess. Going to the canonical "show me the latest perl" page starts off with sort of a pile of random crap, like templates.

I would be happy to make changes to subsequent releases of perl to help MetaCPAN present something better, but in the interim, I would really like to see this improved. What can I do, other than posting this comment?

[rjbs]

Should this have the label group:Perl ?

[haarg]

Related: #849 #1152 #1734 #1468 Perl/perl5#13415

While the issue is more extreme in the case of perl, it's a general problem with how we index things. If we were honoring no_index, that would fix a lot of this, at least in newer perls. There are also a few pod pages that are generated at build time, which could be built at perl release time.

Do we want to try to add a meta field to provide some control over what metacpan shows on the release page?

[rjbs]

(I just commented on #1468 with a suggestion.)