Re: CPAN authors, clean up your directories
by blakem (Monsignor) on Oct 14, 2002 at 08:35 UTC
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From Perl at a glance
The effective size [222 Mb] includes only the most current releases of everything in the Module List, and excludes perl distributions.
If they can programatically calculate the "effective size" and there is a real market for CPAN on a CD (ugh, why?) couldn't they just make an "effective CPAN on CD" and be done with it?
I don't see why anyone would even want a CPAN CD, since it would be obsolete almost as soon as its pressed. Unless you're using it to jumpstart a local mirror of CPAN, whats the point?
-Blake
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Although portions of the CD would become obsolete
when the CD was made, large parts of the CPAN don't
change often.
At YAPC::Europe 2001, we distributed such a CD, using
a script by Johan and some manual cleaning to get CPAN
to fit on one CD. We decided to do this because we had
two sponsors who wanted to sponsor CDs, but our proceedings
didn't require more than one. We figured the CPAN CD
might be of some use to people with slow links.
For this year's YAPC::Europe there was a discussion on
the list about whether the CD was worthwhile, and several
people indicated they were in fact using theirs. I think
they went ahead and made the CD.
The only person who I've spoken with who is using the
CD is Nick Clark. He has a slow link, and so he uses
the CD as an incomplete local mirror, only fetching a
module from another mirror if the version on the CD
isn't the most recent.
(For anyone who might have a similar problem,
there's an answer in the
CPANPLUS FAQ
on how to set this up with CPANPLUS.)
I think this has more to do with the effort to break
Perl in to manageable chunks. A CD probably isn't
the best reason, but it would be nice to see deprecated
modules somehow seperated from the rest
(yet still available).
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Well, portions of that CD would be obsolete the moment it's pressed. Some modules only have new releases every 6 months or worse, they don't get updated at all (checking cpan directory - argh).I am in favour of fitting it all on a CD but you do make a point on why that is not doable of using only the lateste (and perhaps the version before that - see GD). The CPAN CD I got at YAPC::Eu did come in handy... You never know when you're on a plain/train/boat/spacecraft and you just want a play with some module :)
Anyway, cleaning out my CPAN dir is on my TODO list
Greetz
Beatnik
...Perl is like sex: if you're doing it wrong, there's no fun to it.
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Re: CPAN authors, clean up your directories
by PodMaster (Abbot) on Oct 14, 2002 at 09:47 UTC
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I agree.
BackPAN will be there forever ;)
I went and deleted a few files and reclaimed about 20kb.
I hope http://search.cpan.org/
will not get rid of the stuff that can only be found on BackPAN (like after you delete files).
BTW ~ blakems crack about CD's being obsolete the second they're pressed doesn't hold true ~ how many people are still running perl50053? That's right, more than there should be, and #1 reason (i'm guessing here) is probably cause that's what they got on cd.
update: Does cpan.org link to BackPAN?
Apparently Pause knows. After I *scheduled* some files for deletion, I got some info about it, like the current link to BackPAN (temporary), and that it might eventually be accessible via
http://history.perl.org.
____________________________________________________ ** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy. | [reply] |
Re: CPAN authors, clean up your directories
by demerphq (Chancellor) on Oct 14, 2002 at 11:21 UTC
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A slightly different problem is that a lot of CPAN stuff is old and unmaintained without being particularly useful, but occupying a namespace that means that newer better stuff has to be named stupid things.
Id really like to see a way that an unmaintained modules namespace somehow gets "released" to another more diligent maintainer, perhaps after onyl committing to maintian the present interface for some amount of time.
--- demerphq
my friends call me, usually because I'm late....
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I suppose if there was Foo::Bar version 0.8 that's been gathering dust since 1994, and you really wanted that namespace Foo::Bar for yourself, you could simply release Foo::Bar 1.0 that happens to be totally different from the old 0.8.
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Thats possible?
I had for some reason assumed that things that like were prohibited.
Interesting idea, I guess i'd have to speak with the CPAN people to find out what the details of doing such a thing would be.
--- demerphq
my friends call me, usually because I'm late....
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Re: CPAN authors, clean up your directories
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Oct 14, 2002 at 12:00 UTC
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There is no reason for Perl authors to clean up their directory
just because someone wants to make a CD with only the most
recent releases. CPAN.pm has no problem fetching the most recent
version, so if you want to have a CD with just the most recent
versions - do like CPAN.pm. The code is there for everyone to
see.
Abigail | [reply] |
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Re: CPAN authors, clean up your directories
by atcroft (Abbot) on Oct 14, 2002 at 11:29 UTC
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Please excuse my lack of knowledge of the ways of CPAN, for I have yet to have written anything I felt worthy of contributing, but I have a question as one from the user perspective.
How would this affect those who, for whatever reason, must find modules for use with older versions of perl (such as 5.005.03, for instance)? I know recently on a system in production I had to install several modules where I had to go through two or more older implementations before I could find one that would install in such as case, although at the moment I do not recall which modules were involved.
Not that I object to cleaning CPAN if the need is there, but wondering what the effects would be.
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Re: CPAN authors, clean up your directories
by diotalevi (Canon) on Oct 14, 2002 at 13:27 UTC
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So where do regular, run-of-the-mill perl folks like myself find out about this BackPAN? Now that I've heard of it I can google for it but the results are limited. It's not clear from the Google results that BackPAN is even a thing to find. It's not mentioned in the CPAN FAQ or really anywhere I'd ever think to look. So what's the deal? Is this the occult perl user's archive or what?
__SIG__
printf "You are here %08x\n", unpack "L!", unpack "P4", pack "L!", B::
+svref_2object(sub{})->OUTSIDE
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I think that BackPAN is very new and it hasn't been officially announced yet. I saw some mentions of it in Use Perl journals but not elsewhere. Here is some information that I received in an email when I deleted files:
Note: To encourage deletions (and keep CPAN CDROMable), there is a
project underway to maintain the complete PAUSE history on a site
+of
its own, most probably history.perl.org. A preliminary version is
available at ftp://pause.perl.org/pub/backpan/authors/id/
--
John.
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Re: CPAN authors, clean up your directories
by rcaputo (Chaplain) on Oct 14, 2002 at 17:00 UTC
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There's a good reason to delete old distributions if you happen to use RCS or CVS version numbers for your sub-modules.
In a nutshell: RCS (and thus CVS) version numbers sometimes go backwards from CPAN.pm's point of view. For example, RCS version 1.10 comes after 1.9. CPAN.pm tests versions numerically, so 1.10 comes before 1.9.
At last check, CPAN.pm doesn't resolve the deadlock between two versions of a distribution with "newer" sub-modules than the other. Rather, it considers each version of the distribution to be newer than the other. Hijinks ensue, as the link above shows.
-- Rocco Caputo
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$VERSION = do { my @r = (q$Revision: 2.21 $ =~ /\d+/g); sprintf "%d.".
+"%02d" x $#r, @r }; # must be all one line, for MakeMaker
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker | [reply] [d/l] |
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Frankly, I consider this a bug in CPAN. The spirit of Perl
is to have lots of DWIM and to do the "natural" thing.
Considering 10 to be less than 9 isn't natural, nor very
DWIM. Version numbers aren't reals. I think that they are
working on it in 5.9. (And it's better fixed before 5.10
comes out, otherwise that will be consider older than 5.6 or 5.8).
Abigail
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Not only that, but Perl itself want's the 3-digit convention. That is, write "5.010" for version 5 subversion 10. That's used in the built-in version comparisons when translating between floating-point numbers and the newer "v-string" format.
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Re: CPAN authors, clean up your directories
by Juerd (Abbot) on Oct 16, 2002 at 19:23 UTC
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The intention is not to delete modules: just old versions that are of no use except as an archive.
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network
- Yes, I reinvent wheels.
- Spam: Visit eurotraQ.
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