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

I've noticed that some modules, which do exist, are sometimes shown as "not found" on metacpan.org. If you reload the page it will kinda alternate between found and not found. Here is one such module:

Astro::Montenbruck

Some of the modules in that distribution are always found, like Astro::Montenbruck::Ephemeris

Others kinda alternate between found and not found, like Astro::Montenbruck::CoCo

What's going on at metacpan?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Something wrong with metacpan.org?
by kcott (Archbishop) on Feb 03, 2023 at 03:07 UTC

    My experience was different but still indicated a problem.

    Astro::Montenbruck and Astro::Montenbruck::CoCo were always found. I tried reloading and bypassing the cache (Ctrl-Shift-R on Firefox) multiple times.

    Astro::Montenbruck::Ephemeris always gave "404 Not Found". Again, multiple attempts to reload and bypassing the cache.

    I had a look around a few places (Home, About, News) but found nothing mentioning a problem.

    I'd give it some time to see if this gets fixed. If it doesn't, use one of the methods shown in Contact to report the issue.

    — Ken

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Re: Something wrong with metacpan.org?
by sectokia (Friar) on Feb 03, 2023 at 04:48 UTC

    I dont get any problem with any of them.

    It could be a CDN problem, what IP address is sending you the webpages?

    Edit: I am now getting the same symptoms also: random 404's

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Re: Something wrong with metacpan.org? (or Astro::Montenbruck)
by Anonymous Monk on Feb 03, 2023 at 15:09 UTC
    I don't know if it's relevant to the metacpan problem but Astro::Montenbruck, despite working very well as an ephemeris, has weird install issues with regard to CPAN and Perl. A few past releases failed the tests because it didn't install the prerequisite List::MoreUtils. I never noticed it before but the 10 included scripts are simply not installed anywhere. Also it is invisible to ExtUtils::Installed: 
    perl -MAstro::Montenbruck -le 'print $Astro::Montenbruck::VERSION'

    [download]
    > 1.26 
    perl -MExtUtils::Installed -MData::Dumper -le 'print Dumper(ExtUtils::
+Installed->new->files("Astro::Montenbruck"))'

    [download]
    > Astro::Montenbruck is not installed at -e line 1.

    But Module::Metadata sees it (perldoc works too): 

    perl -MModule::Metadata -MData::Dumper -le 'print Module::Metadata->ne
+w_from_module("Astro::Montenbruck")->{filename}'

    [download]
    > /lib/site_perl/5.36.0/Astro/Montenbruck.pm

    I guess something's wrong with the installation configs (packlist?) and hope that someone who understands such things can figure it out and contact the author with the required fixes for this otherwise excellent distribution.

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      Noticed an inconsistency in the name of this module. Searching CPAN brings up this result:

      Search results for "Astro::Montenbruck"

      Astro::Montenbruck - Lightweight Ephemeris

      The top of the page shows this (note the dash):

      Sergey Krushinsky / Astro-Montenbruck-1.26 / Astro::Montenbruck

      The perldoc says:

      NAME

      Montenbruck - Lightweight Ephemeris

      ExtUtils does find the module with a dash instead of colons: 
      perl -MExtUtils::Installed -MData::Dumper -le 'print Dumper(ExtUtils::
+Installed->new->files("Astro-Montenbruck"))'

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        That's normal behaviour, distributions usually have names different to the modules they contain. A colon is not permitted in file names in MSWin32, so you can't name your distribution archive Astro::Montenbruck-1.26.tgz.

        Cf. my Syntax::Construct.

        The ExtUtils find is weird, though: 

        perl -MExtUtils::Installed -MData::Dumper -le 'print Dumper(ExtUtils::
+Installed->new->files("Syntax::Construct"))'
$VAR1 = '/home/choroba/perl5/lib/perl5/Syntax/Construct.pm';
$VAR2 = '/home/choroba/perl5/man/man3/Syntax::Construct.3pm';

perl -MExtUtils::Installed -MData::Dumper -le 'print Dumper(ExtUtils::
+Installed->new->files("Syntax-Construct"))'
Syntax-Construct is not installed at -e line 1.

        [download]

        map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]
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