Hey, CPAN suggested that I install the CPAN::WAIT module

Looking at the code (in CPAN::Shell), it will give that message for any command starting with 'w'. The commands don't appear to be documented in CPAN::Shell itself, you need to look at CPAN::WAIT for them. So first off, are there commands there that you particularly want to take advantage of?

So I'm wondering if WAIT is a dead horse, or if it would be worth bringing up a WAIT server on my Church's little dev box and hitting that.

Well, the module was last updated in 2001, and no issues have ever been filed for it on RT - no open issues, no resolved issues, no rejected issues - so I suspect it has had minimal use since then.

I think today anybody wanting the capabilities supported by CPAN::WAIT would probably look at MetaCPAN instead: it has been around since 2010; is featureful, responsive, and actively maintained and improved; and has its own API for programmatic use. (See also MetaCPAN::Client.)

If there is a fundamental problem causing the tests to fail, it must be a very recent one as there was a passing test on Thursday. The given hostname does not resolve for me so it could certainly be a recent DNS change. If the module and/or the tests are relying on a particular hostname to resolve then that is something easily broken, especially in a release from over 20 years ago.

So I'm wondering if WAIT is a dead horse

No idea, sorry. But it is certainly a very old horse. You could simply try setting $CPAN::Config->{wait_list} to a known, active server and try again. This should over-ride the default setting. Note that it looks like an arrayref.

Good luck.

Looks like the absence of the server was not the major problem ... there was an alarm set, there, so it just kills some time.

I have not debugged it further, looks like some of the fuzzy search funcs are failing.

I'd like to find a known active server, but I know of none. Maybe I'll come back to setting one up.

This may have made sense decades ago, unless you need to run a cpan 'offline', there's no sense in setting anything else up. Re^10: Using a Fetchrow with LWP. If you do need to create an offline mirror/darkpan see minicpan.

It's over 20 years old, I'm not sure how old your cpan is that it suggests using this. Modern alternatives exist, cpanm is significantly faster.

My CPAN is the version that came with my distro, which is devuan ( debian wo systemd ... I LIKE old things! )

/usr/local/bin/cpan version 1.64 calling Getopt::Std::getopts (version
+ 1.13 [paranoid]),
running under Perl version 5.36.0.
  [Now continuing due to backward compatibility and excessive paranoia
+.
   See 'perldoc Getopt::Std' about $Getopt::Std::STANDARD_HELP_VERSION
+.]
Nothing to install!
[download]

I got the suggestion in response to a search attempt gone awry ... I guess this all brings up another question ... is there, by any chance, a curated version of CPAN, with the modules that are no longer useful removed or at least pushed to the background .... It can be frustrating using the full set ... got very excited about the WWW::Mechanize::Firefox module at one point ... turned out that Firefox removed the code that allowed it to work long ago ...

That's older than the shipped cpan changelog, which begins 2005, v1.8. Something don't add up if you have perl v5.36 with a 20 year old cpan.

" guess this all brings up another question..

It's good form to mark significant updates to posts. Task::Kensho I believe aims to make suggestions, see also WWW::Mechanize::Chrome.