view release on metacpan or  search on metacpan

tt/faq.html  view on Meta::CPAN

href="http://ivan.tubert.org/">Ivan Tubert-Brohman</a> (known as <a
href="/~itub">ITUB</a> on CPAN).  The Perl Foundation provided a grant to
encourage him to finish and help pay for some of the expenses.
</p>

<a name="how"></a><h3>How does it work?</h3>

<p>The AnnoCPAN site has the documentation for all the CPAN modules, and a 
database of "notes" that can be added through the web interface. When
a user views a module's documentation, the POD is shown as HTML together 
with the notes. This allows users to write very short notes that fill gaps
in the documentation; for example, it might be sufficient to say "warning:
this method returns different things in scalar and in list context and the POD
doesn't mention it!".</p>

<a name="others"></a><h3>How does this site relate with CPAN::Forum, CPANRatings, search.cpan.org,
PerlMonks...?</h3>

<p>The goals of AnnoCPAN and all these sites overlap to varying degrees, but 
each one fills a different niche:</p>

<ul>

<li><a href="http://search.cpan.org">search.cpan.org</a> has a better search
engine, useful tools such as diff and grep, download links, and browsing.</li>

<li><a
href="http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/htdocs/faqs/cpan-search.html">cpan.uwinnipeg.ca</a>
(also known as Kobes's search) provides an alternative search engine, and other
features such as automatic module classification.</li>

<li><a href="http://www.cpanforum.com">CPAN::Forum</a> has discussion forums
categorized by module. This can be a good place for general discussions about
specific modules whenever a module doesn't have designated discussion places
such as mailing lists already.</li>

<li><a href="http://cpanratings.perl.org">CPANRatings</a> is a good place to
post short reviews and rate modules.</li>

<li><a href="http://www.perlmonks.org">PerlMonks</a> is a community for
learning and discussing all kinds of issues related to Perl.</li>

<li>AnnoCPAN has the goal of letting the post short comments, corrections, or
suggestions about very specific parts of the documentation.</li>

</ul>

<p>Since these websites complement each other, they are frequently linked to
from AnnoCPAN.</p>

<h2>Creating and modifying notes</h2>

<a name="create"></a><h3>How do I add a note?</h3>

<p>After you log in, click on the note icon next to the paragraph where you
want to add the note</p>

<a name="pod"></a><h3>How can I format my notes?</h3>

<p>Currently a subset of POD is allowed.  You can use formatting sequences such
as L&lt;&gt; (link), B&lt;&gt; (bold), I&lt;&gt; (italic), C&lt;&gt; (code),
etc, and verbatim paragraphs (lines that start with a space).  What you can't
use are the pod commands, such as =item, =head1, etc. For more information
about the POD format, see [% link_perldoc_name('perlpod') %].  </p>

<a name="edit"></a><h3>Can I edit my notes?</h3>

<p>Yes, just click on the edit button. Make sure you are logged in first!</p>

<a name="editall"></a><h3>Can I edit other people's notes?</h3>

<p>No, unless you somehow get moderator privileges.</p>

<a name="delete"></a><h3>What's the difference between "hiding" and "deleting" a note?</h3>

<p>Deletion is irreversible and global, meaning that the note will disappear 
from all versions of the POD; hiding is reversible and local, meaning that
the note is hidden only for a specific version of the POD.</p>

<a name="unhide"></a><h3>How do I unhide a note?</h3>

<p>If you go to <code>[% root_uri_abs %]/note/<em>note_id</em></code>, you will
see a list of where the note is listed for each version of a POD, along with
checkboxes for hiding and unhiding notes.</p>

<h2>For Module Authors</h2>

<a name="author_rss"></a><h3>How can I know when someone posts a note to one of my modules?</h3>

<p>You can subscribe to an RSS feed at <code>[% root_uri_abs
%]/~<i>pauseid</i>/recent.rss</code> or view the notes directly at <code>[%
root_uri_abs %]/~<i>pauseid</i>/recent.html</code>. There are plans for setting
up an email notification system as well.</p>

<a name="author_update"></a><h3>What happens if I upgrade my documentation, making a note obsolete?</h3>

<p>The notes can be hidden from the new versions, while keeping them for the
old versions of the documentation (if it's still on CPAN). If the change to the
document was big enough, this might happen automatically; if note, either the
note author or a moderator can do it manually.</p>

<h2>Technical</h2>

<a name="conf"></a><h3>What's the %confidence?</h3>

<p>When a note is added to a document, the software tries to guess where
would the same note go in other versions of the same document. This is based
on a text similarity analysis which provides a quantitative estimate
expressed as a percentage.</p>

<p>For example, let's say that you add a note to My::Module in My-Dist-0.10,
next to a paragraph that says "this is a paragraph". When version 0.20 comes
out, let's say that the paragraph moved and was modified to say "this is
one paragraph". The similarity search decides that this is still the same
paragraph with a confidence of 95% and assigns the note accordingly.</p>

<a name="absurd"></a><h3>A note is in an absurd place! Why's that?</h3>

<p>The notes are assigned to other versions of the document by using the method
discussed above. As with all heuristics, there will be mistakes, especially
when a paragraph is completely deleted or modified very heavily. In these cases