What's happening to CPAN? I'm worried.

isync has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I've discovered that CPAN is currently seeing an erosion (at least regarding mirrors and backpan). Why is that? Who knows about it? I'm worried that things are going downhill for Perl and the *great* CPAN.

- The mirrors listing at https://www.cpan.org/SITES.html is empty.
- A well circulated "official" backpan link effectively links to the normal CPAN frontpage: https://backpan.metacpan.org/. (same for https://cpan.metacpan.org/ which is said to be a backpan mirror).. Probably broken links as http://backpan.perl.org/ and http://backpan.cpantesters.org/ are reachable...

Is that part of some move to (new?) NetActuate infrastructure? Where is some status update/log about all of this? Does anyone know?

Bonus question: is there some place to grep through backpan? grep.cpan.me is down and search engines are prohibited to crawl it

Comment on What's happening to CPAN? I'm worried.

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Re: What's happening to CPAN? I'm worried. by choroba (Cardinal) on Mar 06, 2022 at 17:05 UTC
Not sure about BackPan, but yes, CPAN mirrors are no longer needed. Read Project: Shutting down the CPAN mirror network for details. The basic idea is that mirrors are so 20^th century, we have CDN now instead. `map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]\|\|0,1}[\\|\|{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^ARGV,3]`	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: What's happening to CPAN? I'm worried. by cavac (Parson) on Mar 07, 2022 at 08:07 UTC
I'm OK with that, as long as the cpan client still allows mirrors to be configured. I'm running local a local CPAN::Mini mirror for development reason. This allows me to override some module (injecting debugging code and so) and allows me to easily deploy my darkpan modules and module versions that have not yet released on CPAN. `perl -e 'use Crypt::Digest::SHA256 qw[sha256_hex]; print substr(sha256_hex("the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything"), 6, 2), "\n";'`	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: What's happening to CPAN? I'm worried. by ikegami (Patriarch) on Mar 07, 2022 at 07:25 UTC
CPAN mirrors are no longer needed. Maybe, but mirrors are still being used. CDN is just a fancy word for mirrors. The difference between the old mirror system and the new mirror system is transparency.	[reply]
Re^2: What's happening to CPAN? I'm worried. by isync (Hermit) on Mar 06, 2022 at 18:47 UTC
Ah, ok. (sigh) It's only outdated links and missing notes. Thanks for this link to the discussion about it!	[reply]
Re: What's happening to CPAN? I'm worried. by perlfan (Vicar) on Mar 10, 2022 at 06:23 UTC
I am worried that you're worried. Let's leave the concern trolling and lowkey FUD to reddit.	[reply]


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