It does what it purports to do :P
Storable
Storable - persistence for Perl data structures
DESCRIPTION
The Storable package brings persistence to your Perl data structures
containing SCALAR, ARRAY, HASH or REF objects, i.e. anything that can be
conveniently stored to disk and retrieved at a later time.
... serializing and deserializing.
Serialization In computer science, in the context of data storage and transmission, serialization is the process of converting a data structure or object state into a format that can be stored (for example, in a file or memory buffer, or transmitted across a network connection link) and "resurrected" later in the same or another computer environment.
So Storable lets you save data structures to disk.
You want to use Storable when creating these data structures is expensive, like for cpan/cpanp.
cpanp makes sourcefiles.s2.30.c0.9109.stored out of 01mailrc.txt.gz,02packages.details.txt.gz, 03modlist.data.gz
$ ls -loanh *gz *stored
-rw-rw-rw- 1 0 181K 2011-08-24 04:05 01mailrc.txt.gz
-rw-rw-rw- 1 0 1.1M 2011-08-24 04:05 02packages.details.txt.gz
-rw-rw-rw- 1 0 190K 2011-08-24 04:05 03modlist.data.gz
-rw-rw-rw- 1 0 23M 2011-08-16 23:06 sourcefiles.s2.30.c0.9109.stored
and cpan makes a Metadata out of the same files $ ls -loanh Metadata
-rw-rw-rw- 1 0 16M 2011-08-13 09:15 Metadata
cpan/cpanp use these files, when you're checking if you have the latest version of a module, who the author is, what other modules the author has ...
Generating the data from the tarballs on each run would be expensive (read SLOW)
cpan/cpanp typically update these files once a day
|