In many cases the performance of http and ftp will be equal, or at least indistinguishable.

That being the case, and ftp having so many issue (allowed connection limits, firewals and active/passive mode interactions), I think most folks will actually be happier having the http URLs first.

Of course, this assumes that whatever web proxies you're going through allow whatever user agent string that CPAN uses.

Looking at the actual CPAN.pm file ($VERSION = '1.61'), there are 2 places where I see:

$Ua = CPAN::LWP::UserAgent->new;
[download]

Placing:

$Ua->agent('some_string_the_firewall_likes');
[download]

after the second such reference changed the UAS used for CPAN going out to a URL in the urllist. .

I've never heard of a Perl mirror, or really anything in the unix world, giving people trouble over agent strings. Actually I do a lot of my browsing with "Aighearach was here" as my agent string, without trouble.

Do you have an example of a CPAN mirror or other Perl site that has a restriction of this sort?

For the most part I do agree with you that HTTP is a better bet if you don't know what FTP servers are good. Personally, I just lean heavy on the NASA server, and use an HTTP as a backup.
--
Snazzy tagline here

The user agent string issue arises when you are behind a web proxy (e.g. trying to use CPAN from work), and the outbound proxy in the corporate firewall cares about the user agent string. You're expected to use a recent version of NS or IE (or Mozilla). There is a separate allowed UAS reserveed for programs fetching stuff from the web, but it's not the one the LWP gives out.

I agree that the mirrors typically don't care.



--Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com