jkeenan1 wrote:
Are the long delays I'm experiencing due to the fact that ftp.perl.org is the first place my shell looks? Or are the delays due to LWP::UserAgent and Net::FTP, which never seem to work?

The long delays are due to the failures of LWP::UserAgent and Net::FTP. CPAN will continue to try those approaches to retrieving the needed files from the mirror host until the lengthy failure timeouts are reached, then will (as reported) fall back to a less sophisticated means. The intelligence to "observe" the previous failures is not part of CPAN, and this is the most frequent valid complaint I hear from Perl users about that software. Note please the qualifiers: frequent and valid. There are numerous other complaints, some of which I regard as not valid (they seem based on what are to me, expectations of the software that are not part of the stated interface, goals or point of the system); and there are other less-frequently raised complaints that I regard as valid.

LWP::UserAgent has worked in CPAN for me on most machines I use, eventually, but sometimes I have had to reinstall newer releases of it or otherwise fiddle with something. As for the mirror host, that is the most common cause of failure in my experience, and deserves attention. I do not enjoy the exasperation of having a failure to connect to a configured host block my work, so I worked out some code (posted on my home node) that checks the list of configured hosts before trying to do anything else in CPAN's shell. It is not necessary to go through the entire (lengthy, tedious, error-prone, somewhat confusing for new users) CPAN configuration session that is invoked by doing in the CPAN shell " o conf init ", just to change the list of mirror hosts. Some newer CPAN users most likely would think that it is, so I mention it here.

    Soren A / somian / perlspinr / Intrepid

In reply to Re: Why is the CPAN shell not DWIMming? by Intrepid
in thread Why is the CPAN shell not DWIMming? by jkeenan1

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