search_authors() should also allow looking in 00whois.xml

[karenetheridge]

01mailrc.txt does not contain unicode author information, whereas 00whois.xml does. It would be useful to provide interfaces to search both these files, to gain access to information only available in one of them.

(note to self: find out why both these files exist and one cannot be phased out in favour of the other.)

[dagolden]

01mailrc provides email addresses -- which, by definition, can not be Unicode unless they are appropriately encoded. The whois appears to be for web page generation and other consumption.

Rather than larding up CPAN::Common::Index with routines to search what indexes we have (and, no, I don't want to add XML parsing because we don't have it in core), I'd like to instead suggest that we figure out what questions we're asking and what indexes that would imply and then get those implemented on PAUSE.

There have been a lot of extra indexes created for special purposes already and while I appreciate Andreas' willingness to add what people ask for, I also think we ought to step back and see if the existing indexes can be rationalized in a useful way -- possibly by delivering the underlying databases (sans password hashes) in a regularly updated way.

This is, of course, and ideal discussion for Lyon. ☺

cc: @rjbs @andk