author page does not show releases superceded by newer releases of other authors

[wchristian]

As an example: https://metacpan.org/author/PETDANCE?sort=%5B%5B2%2C1%5D%5D

Petdance did release WWW::Mechanize in the past: https://metacpan.org/release/PETDANCE/WWW-Mechanize-1.64/

However this does not show on his author page.

Since then Jesse Vincent has made newer releases of Mech, which is probably the reason for it not being visible on Petdance's page: https://metacpan.org/release/WWW-Mechanize

Is this intentional or could this be restored?

[rwstauner]

found the change: d91091e

[rwstauner]

To recap the IRC discussion
this was changed for performance/feasibility...
not limiting to latest means that a query gets all releases (all versions of all dists released by an author), which can be hefty... for example, requesting for the mighty miyagawa throws an error because his ~1200 releases cross the ES threshold of 1000.

So basically what we need is the equivalent of a SELECT DISTINCT or GROUP BY.
Someone said this is still on the ES todo-list.

Maybe we could implement some sort of group_by on the api.

[rwstauner]

I have since realized that this concept -- only return the most recent version of all dists that match this query -- is really what I was trying to achieve when I incorrectly came up with metacpan/metacpan-api#153. When working on that branch I recall having trouble grasping/articulating/coding that abstract notion that was in my head... I knew latest wasn't really what I wanted, but "all" wasn't what I wanted either.

So this sort of "filter" (likely incorrect term in light of ES) probably could have more uses.

[rwstauner]

maybe @clintongormley would have some advice?

[oalders]

This issue is related to #128

[rwstauner]

This is the IRC conversation I referenced above:
http://irclog.perlgeek.de/metacpan/2012-01-30

[karenetheridge]

If you only list the dists for which this author released the latest version, can you offer another page (or an option on this page) which demonstrates the current behaviour? I find it quite useful to look at an author page to see the full list of modules that that author has released (and I use it frequently to get my own list, as I tend to care more about dists that I've released in the past).

[monken]

let's implement the group_by thing in the api and call that from metacpan-web. I don't see a problem as long as we don't try to group results > 10,000 or something.
But let's do this right and not hack away in the front-end.

[karenetheridge]

There are at least two classes of distributions that I can think of that currently don't show up in the authors list (as covered by this and other issues):

• indexed releases that are now superceded by other releases (either by this author or another author)
• releases that are TRIAL and have no non-TRIAL releases (i.e. there is no index for that dist name at all)

I'd find it quite useful to have a view into these files, perhaps by panes that are collapsed by default (so the work doesn't need to be done to fetch their contents until required)? This could be a nicer version of the "see all my files" page on PAUSE (except that doesn't show files moved to the backPAN, whereas on metacpan we could also include those as well).

[ranguard]

Moving to wishlist: https://github.com/CPAN-API/cpan-api/wiki/Wishlist