Category Archives: cpan

The power of not being all things to all people

The Perl community seems abuzz about the cool new cpanminus client by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa. After about two weeks of development, this is a reasonably functional CPAN client with just a fraction of the overhead, complexity and verbosity of the CPAN and CPANPLUS clients that come with the Perl core.
It’s a remarkable achievement, not only [...]

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Module::Build version 0.36 released

After four months of development and 15 development releases along the way, I’m pleased to announce that Module::Build 0.36 is now on CPAN. Version 0.36 will also be included in the next release of the Perl 5.11.X development series. I would like to thank everyone who contributed patches, suggestions, testing or other support [...]

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Version number sanity

I’ve written at length how I wish version numbers were boring and why they aren’t. What I haven’t done well is to express what I think that means. In some recent conversations on the perl5-porters mailing list and #p5p on IRC, I took a stab at a definition, which I’ll repost here.
In part, [...]

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Too many CPAN.pm config options?

Over the years, CPAN.pm has accumulated a staggering number of configuration options. Recently, an otherwise expert Perl programmer (that I won’t embarrass by name) asked on IRC for the name of an option rather than reading the (admittedly long) manual. This reminded me that many Perl users may not know about a handy [...]

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Extending the timeline for CPAN Meta Spec revisions

When I set out the time line for revisions to the CPAN Meta Spec, I was anticipating closing the public comments at the end of October and finalizing the spec at the end of November.
Fortunately for Perl, but unfortunately for me, our new pumpking, Jesse Vincent, announced on Halloween a Perl core [...]

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Module::Build release candidate for 0.36

Module::Build 0.35_07 has arrived on CPAN. This closes all all Critical, Important and Normal bug tickets from the rt.cpan.org ticket queue that are not stalled for upstream fixes.
I consider it “Release Candidate 0″ for 0.36. This means my focus will be on fixing any show-stoppers in the release candidates and that there is [...]

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In progress: auto-selection of CPAN mirrors

Lately, I’ve been working improving the CPAN.pm user experience, particularly with regards to configuration. I’ve already made CPAN.pm autoconfiguration quieter, and now I’m working on letting it automatically choose mirrors for you. Here’s sample output from my work in progress:

cpan[3]> o conf init urllist

Now you need to choose your CPAN mirror sites. [...]

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Summary of CPAN Meta Spec public discussions

The public discussion period for CPAN Meta Spec Proposals is now closed. I would like thank everyone who contributed proposals, feedback and patches. We received 34 proposals, which resulted in over 340 discussion emails on the cpan-workers list from 23 people.
Of the 34 proposals, 18 had some degree of consensus and at least [...]

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CPAN Meta Spec public discussion period closes November 1

On November 1, the public comment period will be over.
That means I’ll take areas of consensus and corresponding patches and merge them into a proposed draft spec. For anything with consensus and no patch I’ll make a final request for volunteers to write it up. Anything without consensus will get dropped [...]

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Hammering away in the Perl toolchain smithy

What have I been up to lately? I’ve been tooling (toiling?) away in the Perl toolchain smithy, fixing up modules on CPAN and patching blead.
CPAN module work:

Released Module::Build 0.35_03. Among other things, this is much quieter by default, with less junk spewed onto the terminal.
Released ExtUtils::CBuilder 0.26_04. This splits Windows compiler packages [...]

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