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Monks,

After using GitHub, Google Code and other online coding collaboration tools, CPAN (once a shining jewel in my view) is starting to feel a bit 1990's-ish.

There are some nice tools - bugtracking, annotations, dependency generation, reviews, discussion forums, etc. However, they are not truly integrated into a single interface and -- because of the distributed, mirrored architecture of search.cpan.org -- probably never will be.

Even though CPAN is 100 miles above and beyond what you will find for other languages, we cannot leave well enough alone. I say it's high time we -- as a community -- or someone -- as an individual -- create a replacement for search.cpan.org.

Surely we cannot wait until after Perl6 is ready to begin this. It must happen now.

A shortlist of functionality I would expect (at a minimum would include:

Listing of Modules/Distributions/Authors (like what we already have)
Module activity levels - like on GitHub
Author activity levels - like on GitHub
The ability to "follow" modules - so you will know when they are updated.
Discussion forums that:
- Are faster.
- More modern.
- Include the features that thousands of other forums should Just Have.
Source control - either via SVN, Darcs, Git or what-have-you.
Forking/Branching/Merging - like on GitHub. Abandoned modules should not be allowed to languish forever. This process could replace the current "Take over a distribution" workflow in PAUSE.

It would also be great to have a kind of Twitter-like thing that you could watch to see things happen in real time. Downloads, test failures, reviews, ratings, forks, etc. We all know that there is a great deal of CPAN activity, but because it's spread out we don't get visibility into what is happening As It Happens.

Yes - I know that some of these features simply Would Not Work under the current architecture. A new architecture will be needed.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build something better than the current search.cpan.org.

In reply to Upgrading CPAN - Yes We Can by jdrago_999

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