CPAN down again... (search.cpan.org)

I don't know what the full back story is behind this, but I've noticed that CPAN is going down a lot lately.

As the first port of call for anyone searching Perl documentation, I think this reflects really badly on the community - I mean, if I wasn't sold on Perl, started looking into it and hit errors on the language's main (edit: "main module documentation") web site, I'd be thinking something along the lines of, "If they can't keep up a web site, how can we rely on Perl as a technology?".

Is there no way that maybe the error pages could be updated if the server situation is not easily fixable? Surely it would be better to display more than just "504 Gateway Time-out" ??? Maybe something more descriptive, in a formatted HTML page that links to other Perl resources (Perlmonks, perl.com. perldocs.net etc).

It a little embarrassing when I'm excitedly discussing a cool aspect of Perl and then try to send that person the CPAN page, only to hit an error message. What can be done to fix this?

(edited title for clarity)

Comment on CPAN down again... (search.cpan.org)

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Re: CPAN down again... by marto (Cardinal) on Jul 14, 2014 at 12:38 UTC
For clarity, http://cpan.org is up, http://search.cpan.org is having problems, again. I raised the issue a few times and suggested that http://noc.perl.org/ be updated with a section for reporting issues, this is now live. CPAN isn't the main perl website. That's http://www.perl.org, not is it the place to search for perl documentaiton, that's http://perldoc.perl.org. Your idea for updating the error pages seems reasonable, I suggest you raise it. I've never had this issue with http://metacpan.org, http://mcpan.org is (I'm informed) a drop in replacement for the search syntax of http://search.cpan.org. Update: sort of related - Proposal - Update shortcuts pointing to cpan.org to link to mcpan.org.	[reply]
Re^2: CPAN down again... by cLive ;-) (Prior) on Jul 14, 2014 at 12:50 UTC
Who do I raise the issue with? CPAN is the main Perl site for anything not in core. Pretty much every Perl module you search on has search.cpan.org as one of the top three search results. eg MIME::Lite, Moose (second result), Plack (second result). In none of those does www.perl.org appear as a resource, with only perl.org appearing as a whitepaper on Plack.	[reply]
Re^3: CPAN down again... by marto (Cardinal) on Jul 14, 2014 at 12:55 UTC
The fact that cpan module documentation can be found on cpan is hardly surprising, but the following statements aren't accurate for cpan.org: "first port of call for anyone searching Perl documentation" "hit errors on the language's main web site" My earlier post explains the differences. "Who do I raise the issue with?" The contact details are on the noc page. An issue tracker for some things an email address for everything else.	[reply]
Re: CPAN down again... by tobyink (Canon) on Jul 14, 2014 at 13:01 UTC
As per marto's reply, the CPAN is not down. The CPAN is an archive mirrored across almost 500 servers in over 60 countries. It's hard to imagine anything short of the zombie apocalypse taking the CPAN down. search.cpan.org is down though. search.cpan.org is a sites that provide a nice, searchable interface listing CPAN distributions and showing their documentation. Although it is a popular gateway to the CPAN, it is not the only one. We also have metacpan.org, which is gaining ground in terms of popularity. (There was also kobesearch once upon a time, but its maintainer sadly passed away, and the site is no more. There is periodic talk of resurrecting the site.) toby döt ink	[reply]
Re^2: CPAN down again... by cLive ;-) (Prior) on Jul 14, 2014 at 13:44 UTC
search.cpan.org is a sites that provide a nice, searchable interface listing CPAN distributions and showing their documentation. Although it is a popular gateway to the CPAN, it is not the only one. If you're using Google, it's pretty much the only one that you'll hit. And, if you aren't familiar with Perl and don't know about the alternatives, then it will be the documentation you hit. I don't think I've ever seen metacpan in a Google search result for a module.	[reply]
Re^3: CPAN down again... by tobyink (Canon) on Jul 14, 2014 at 16:29 UTC
With the amount of personalisation done, it's hard to compare Google searches. The results I get are not likely to be the same as the ones you get. But searching for "kavorka perl" I get the following: http://blogs.perl.org/users/toby_inkster/2013/11/introducing-kavorka.html http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Kavorka https://metacpan.org/release/Kavorka https://github.com/tobyink/p5-kavorka https://github.com/lukec/stripe-perl/issues/28 (hmmm... looks interesting... I think I'll reply to this issue) So metacpan is certainly in there, even if it's not (yet) rating as highly as search.cpan.org. If the latter is constantly down when Googlebot visits though, expect this to change over time! toby döt ink	[reply]
Re: CPAN down again... (search.cpan.org) by Anonymous Monk on Jul 14, 2014 at 18:59 UTC
Jun 03, 2014 at 11:07 UTC Proposal - Update shortcuts pointing to cpan.org to link to mcpan.org Jul 14, 2014 at 12:29 UTC CPAN down again... (search.cpan.org) Dec 24, 2013 at 16:49 UTC search.cpan.org is on the blink. Anyone know why? minicpan_webserver / CPAN::Mini::Webserver - Search and browse Mini CPAN CPAN::Search::Lite - setup and maintain a searchable CPAN database CPAN::Webserver - Browse and search CPAN locally AnnoCPAN - Annotated CPAN documentation, example http://annocpan.org/~MAKAMAKA/Text-CSV-1.32/lib/Text/CSV.pm CPAN->grep · Search code on CPAN http://cpan.org links to MetaCPAN and The CPAN Frequently Asked Questions - www.cpan.org and I'm having trouble with search.cpan.org, whom do I need to contact? So there you have it, annocpan for docs , or metacpan for docs... :)	[reply]
Re^3: Nobody Expects the Agile Imposition (Part VII): Metrics by bulrush (Scribe) on Jul 15, 2014 at 11:07 UTC
Anywhoo, OP, I'm 99% sure this was a planned outage for CPAN. I saw some notice somewhere but I couldn't find it again. Perl 5.8.8 on Redhat Linux RHEL 5.5.56 (64-bit)	[reply]
Re^4: Nobody Expects the Agile Imposition (Part VII): Metrics by DrHyde (Prior) on Jul 21, 2014 at 15:15 UTC
http://log.perl.org/2014/07/7182014-scheduled-maintenance-moving-day.html	[reply]

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