Re: CPAN tarballs - can names every be duplicated?

[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).

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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.