It’s a good idea, but a completely wrong solution. If someone is going to implement this, the proper way is not creating a PAUSE and CPAN mirror or anything like it. Corporate requirements are different. What you really need is a revival of http://debian.pkgs.cpan.org/ and also complete repositories for RHEL5, Debian, Ubuntu LTS, SLES9/10 etc. Those can be mirrored at will by usual and well-tested tools.

Thank you.

Update: Removed last sentence, it’s been a “thinko” on my side :(

Yes, I know, CPAN is great. I even agree. CPAN is great because of the sheer amount of data collected. But it’s a complete disaster otherwise. I might be a bloody newbie in Perl world, but everytime I’m confronted with CPAN, I’m lost and confused — and there is a major flaw in CPAN causing that feeling: every module in CPAN is essentially an open-source project, but nothing at CPAN works under this assumption. It’s full of closed down silos.

Let’s start with a simple example: toying with CPANPLUS::Dist::RPM (or maybe it’s this link, who knows which is the canonical one) at work I’ve noticed it hangs sometimes, consuming 100% of CPU essentially doing nothing worthy. Let’s now assume I’d like to investigate this problem, but I don’t know if this is a bug or a mistake on my side.

So I go to the CPAN page of the package. Oh, there is a discussion forum, let’s click on that! Too bad, it’s broken. Bug reports? Oh yeah, there are whole three of them — none of which is my problem as far I can see. And I can actually barely see, since the visual component of that bug tracker makes Bugzilla of 1998 look good. But I still not sure that’s a bug, so I wouldn’t file one. What’s next? Maybe there is something new and relevant in development code in the revision control system? Oh wait, there isn’t any. CVS, SVN, Git, Mercurial, anything? Nope, no such thing on CPAN. Only release tarballs and some weird release differ tool. No revision control for an open source hosting in 2009, am I looking right?! Only way to ask something is to ask the author per e-mail? What about collaboration, patches, interactive community process for single modules?

Dear Github guys, if you happen to read this, please host the CPAN for us! Revision control, bug tracking, code review, documentation parser — if you could add some discussion forums, you’d be a perfect CPAN hoster!

So CPAN is so far: EPIC FAIL in discussion forums, somewhat FAIL in bug reports, EPIC FAIL in encouraging open development. Those are basic open source functionality nowadays, you know. And those are not nearly scratching the surface of critisicm.

Every other page on CPAN is different in design and interaction, there is no common and consice web interface, many different docs/search/rating mirrors which ultimatively produce a lot of Google spam. An awesome lot of cruft, a lot of broken modules which pop up prominently as first search result, no clear indication if a module is abandoned or actively developed. Even the most potentially useful features like dependencies’ resolution are crippled — dependencies work only in one direction, whenever I’d like to know how people actually use some module, I’m lost again. This is CPAN of today, confusing and rusty. CPAN is naked and it seems nobody wants to point that out. I do not want to think that nobody actually notices.

The situation with CPAN is symptomatic for the whole Perl community. Whether it’s Perl.com, Perl.org, Perl Mongers site, Perl Monks, use Perl or CPAN, it’s always the same: unreadable and misaligned content, incomprehensive navigation and straining colors, self-representation on the web coming straight from 1999 ¹. All the good code in the world and the power of the language won’t help anyone as long as people are alienated by ugly tools, visually and technically. Why can’t CPAN have the visual docs design from http://perldoc.perl.org, which at least features a syntax highlighter? Some CPAN mirror I land on every now and then from Google is even uglier than the one at http://search.cpan.org. Do we care at all about how those sites look? Do we care about fellow Perlers, about how hard they have to look for information? Why isn’t there some central site for Perl information? Why is every Perl project so independant that things like Perl Iron Man happen without cooperation with Planet Perl? ²

Perl community has so many possibilities but most of them stay unused. Most people are probably content with what they have and wouldn’t want to change anything. It’s fine, Perl’s way certainly supports that, but then we can forget about Perl revival. It’d be a shame, but we’d have only us to blame, not some superstitions about Perl being a “write-only language” or “ASCII soup”. The first impression counts and many newbies might not make it to the code at all — they’ll struggle with finding tutorials first. They won’t find out why Perl is great and will leave for other, probably inferior, languages, because they’ll be reading some ugly outdated quickstart documentation from 1997. They won’t find the shiny things, but they should be able to — as their first Google search result.