I am (especially over the last few days) begining to grow on the idea that CPAN submissions need to be peer reviewed and audited substantially, and that there needs to be formal standards on what make/install/test scripts can and can not do. This won't address the security issue of CPAN getting comprimised, but it protects from damage until the server is 'owned'.

Proposed standards:
- No module may make outside network connection without asking the user, including downloading, reporting statistics, etc
- No module may create or remove files outside it's .cpan directory for testing, etc, unless first asking the user...
- A module must not attack databases at random, etc
- (add more here)

Debian has some sort of review, acceptance/rejection, process for modules, using debconf, etc ... not the ideal model, but something to consider.

The natural progression of this is more controversial, especially in the Perl area ... but it would include assurance of test suite quality, code quality, maintainability, and a certain need for the module ...

CPAN has some great stuff on it now, but it has a lot of incomplete stuff that should not have been submitted, which just fills up the search results and causes trouble when you are looking for something useful. There are also a lot of dead/broken/abandoned modules.

I am not the one to clean it up, but it (being the greatest thing Perl has going for it), could certaintly use some improvement to harden it up a bit.

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