How do the checksums on CPAN get updated?

[thor]

Hi all,

So recently, I went to install XML::Simple on my local machine. It however, complained that the checksum for the tar file that it downloaded didn't match the checksum in the CHECKSUMS file. My question is: is it up to the CPAN author to update that file, or is it automatically generated by CPAN when a new version of a module is uploaded?

[syphilis]

Good question. I can't find any information anywhere on the CHECKSUMS file ... which probably just means I'm not looking in the right place. In fact I can't even find a CHECKSUMS file. There's no reference to it at http://search.cpan.org/~grantm/XML-Simple-2.14/ .

Where is it ?

Cheers,
Rob

[randyk]

A CHECKSUMS file is in each CPAN author directory; for example, see http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/G/GR/GRANTM/. They are generated automatically, and from some random browsing of recent arrivals, appear to be updated about 3 hours or so after the latest release in a particular directory. So in principle there may be a time delay present between a distribution and it's appearance in the CHECKSUMS file. However, XML-Simple was last updated on 29-Jan-2005, and the CHECKSUMS file at www.cpan.org is dated 11-Nov-2005, so there shouldn't be a problem in this respect. This probably means you're either using an out-of-synch mirror or there was a problem in the network transfer.

[thor]

This probably means you're either using an out-of-synch mirror or there was a problem in the network transfer.

The latter turned out to be the case. This is really funny, though. I maintain a CPAN mirror on a local machine and refresh it once a week, so I had ruled out either of those scenarios. Somehow, cpanp pulled the file and it had 0 size. I'll try to track down how that happened in the code and maybe even fix it. My suspicion is that I had a full disk at the time (dl'ing too much anime ;) Thanks for all your help!