"Meta doesn't even look like CPAN."

CPAN is not the front end here. CPAN is the collection of distributions in a central location. search.cpan.org is simply a method to access it. Besides, the most infrequent thing I do with CPAN is search it so the name is irrelevant to me. Also, I much prefer the look and feel of meta, and when someone enters a search link and I want to review the distribution, I manually review it on meta as opposed to clicking the link.

"It's such a bad idea I would pay to stop it. I can kick in five figures. Where do I send the check?"

Right here. for $99,999, I guarantee you that within a month I will have the whole thing re-created ;)

Have you considered actually raising these issues with the people who are in a position to do respond with authority? 301s will result in search engine index entries being updated, over time. The redirects will have been tested (you could do this yourself if you wanted), so I don't think breakage is going to be a problem.

Have you considered actually raising these issues with the people who are in a position to... respond with authority?

People are very defensive about their bad ideas. I have lots of experience failing to convince them otherwise and have learned to spot and avoid those who are truly committed. I'm quite sure they would respond with all the reasons why I am wrong.

Besides, there is much more to this situation than meets the eye, and I'm not inside so they won't listen and may not be able to: (from stackoverflow: Hm... seems here is some background "war" between Perl institute (owner of cpan.org) and Perl foundation (owner of metacpan.org).

All the camels in my browser history and bookmarks are changing to four red dots. What do they mean? Hopefully meta can get legal permission to use the camel trademark for favicon!

I don't think breakage is going to be a problem.

It's already broken: redirects "fix" it. Some linux distro barfed recently on cpan being changed to mcpan... and it will get worse.


perl -MO=Deparse -e "S U M E D O E P L R"

"I'm quite sure they would respond with all the reasons why I am wrong."

So, a couple of things:

"Besides, there is much more to this situation than meets the eye"

If you're going to cite something as a source, at least read it:

"Hm... seems here is some background "war" between Perl institute (owner of cpan.org) and Perl foundation (owner of metacpan.org). Not working search.cpan.org hurts perl, so if someone want stop search.cpan.org it should at least put to search.cpan.org an redirector what should redirect requests to the metacpan.org. The current status is really boring. BTW, here is already one reopen vote - voting to reopen too, (and reformulate the question) to: how to write a a simple PSGI cpan->metacpan redirector... ;) – jm666 May 19 '14 at 14:30

There is no background war. The Perl Institute does not exist. I took that over a long time ago, then merged it with The Perl Foundation. The cpan.org domain is different than a particular host. Elaine Ashton and Jarkko Hientenami control the domain records, but not every host. search.cpan.org is run by Graham Barr (by himself). – brian d foy May 19 '14 at 14:48

chromatic has been very clear in correcting the users misinformation.

"it's already broken: redirects "fix" it."

This is also untrue. search.cpan.org currently works, it won't redirect to metacpan until the 25th, and even then searching won't be broken, searches will just redirect to the same place cpan.org has taken you for years.

People are very defensive about their bad ideas.

Agree. You don't have to keep it up though. :P