CPAN tarballs - can names every be duplicated?

[mp]

In CPAN, is it possible for two different modules to ever share the same tar.gz file name but different authors?

For example, there is a module: Text-Repository-1.04.tar.gz. It resides in $CPAN/authors/id/D/DA/DARREN/Text-Repository-1.04.tar.gz. Is it possible for a different Text-Repository-1.04.tar.gz to ever reside in some other author's directory and be a different module, or are there safeguards in place to prevent this?

I did parse 02packages.details.txt.gz looking for cases where a file name appeared in multiple author directories, but the only one I could find where this had occurred was

HTML-Summary-0.017.tar.gz

which appears in both

A/AW/AWRIGLEY/HTML-Summary-0.017.tar.gz
and
T/TG/TGROSE/HTML-Summary-0.017.tar.gz

However, further investigation reveals that the contents of these files are identical.

[jasonk]

PAUSE (The Perl Authors Upload Server, the backend part of CPAN) provides a mechanism to register your namespace, to prevent collisions, but this operates only on the namespace itself, the filename is not necessarily closely related to the namespace (such as the LWP modules being in a file called lib-www-perl). I don't believe there is anything that prevents the same filename from being used more than once however (other than the restriction that you can't upload a file with the same name into your own directory a second time, even if you delete the original).

---

We're not surrounded, we're in a target-rich environment!

[mp]

Thank you, this answered my question. To verify, I followed Abigail-IIs suggestion in this thread, and uploaded a tar.gz file to PAUSE whose filename exactly matched that of an existing file previously uploaded by another author.

PAUSE accepted the upload, so there is nothing in place to prevent file names from being reused by a different author. PAUSE does prevent the same filename from being uploaded again by the same author.

[PodMaster]

In the case you are describing, it would appear that AWRIGLEY is currently maintaining HTML-Summary (or he took over maintenance of the module). To find out whether this is actually true or not, you'd have to contact both the authors.

There is a reason the CPAN faq says that you should ask on the modules list before releasing anything to cpan.

MJD says you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo! I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6x+5.8x. I take requests. ** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

[Abigail-II]

Well, did you try it out? Go to PAUSE, create a user id if you don't have one yet, and upload something with a filename that already exists. If PAUSE allows it (which I think it does), it will be allowed, if PAUSE doesn't allow it, you'll notice.

Abigail