I see a huge benefit to this. It is unfortunate that it's not a good idea (in its current form at any rate).

The problem is that if the service became useful the the server load would become enourmous. Too much, I think, for the Monastery to handle.

Secondly, I think that there is a huge amount of material already out there that would be of great use to such a catelouge. An optimal discussion area would leverage this information, which would only vastly increase space, or else suffer from the Sea of Broken Links effect, as we tried to point off-site.

Thirdly, I see a potential for the growth of implementation discussions. Here we begin to see a slippery slope - there are huge benefits to discussing implementation details, both as a learning resource for implementors and as a knowledge base for potential users (after all, knowing that Secure::Module::Which_Does::Encryption::Stuff uses a cruddy xor algorithm could be very useful to a user!). But at what point would we cross into a "go to the LWP list" mode? How do we contain such discussion to make it maximally useful and not split between here and the varous mailing lists?

Finally, the organizational structure of Everything may (though I'm not sure) be suboptimal for such a structure. Free association is fundamental to the way the Monastery works, but not so for such a resource.

What would be nice would be a human organized catalouge of the CPAN. But who would volunteer for this job? Well, perhaps me, but don't quote me, and Jarkko has enough on his plate :-).

Light a man a fire, he's warm for a day. Catch a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. - Terry Pratchet