At search.cpan.org,
as well as within
CPAN-Search-Lite, attempts are made to obtain
module and package descriptions
from the pod, if the CPAN indices don't have them.
An alternative to downloading and extracting the pod,
or using WWW::Mechanize, is to use the
csl_soap script that comes with CPAN-Search-Lite to query, via a soap interface, the database that
cpan.uwinnipeg.ca uses. If you set, within the script,
my $soap_uri =
'http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/Apache/InfoServer';
my $soap_proxy =
'http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/cgi-bin/ppminfo.cgi';
then calling the script as:
perl csl_soap --module Catalyst::Plugin::Geography
will fetch the available information from the database,
including the description.
The mod_search function of
PPM::Make::Util indicates how this soap service
can accept an array reference of module names. Currently
there isn't support for wild-card searches, but that
could easily be added, if there was interest.