cpan you have to see

[Peter Sergeant]

On Wednesday, December 12, 2012, DAVID HODGKINSON wrote:

>
> Would hurling a PBP test at the whole of CPAN to get a metric be of any
> benefit?
>

Probably not. perl critic, which sounds like what you're thinking about, is
a useful tool for catching silly mistakes you might have made, but if you
know what you're doing then many of the things it considers errors are
actually reasonable.

I've worked in a couple of places that run perl critic over the codebase as
part of automated testing, and it's been useful. Invariably though
situations arise where you break one of its rules and switch it off for
that line of code.

Unless someone has written their code with it, and explicitly marked where
they know better, their code is liable to be penalised by a perl critic
scorer. Additionally the score will reflect "the small stuff" and not
quality of interface, design, documentation, etc, leading to dreadful code
with a perfect score, and excellent code with a terrible score