You're right that some mirrors contain more files than others, and it's probably a configuration issue; for rsync, for example, one would have to enable the --delete flag.

It's important to distinguish the CPAN.pm/CPANPLUS.pm tools from the CPAN/PAUSE indices living under $CPAN/authors/ and $CPAN/modules/; the tools are just following what's in the indices, and so aren't "broken" in this respect. As you say, it would be possible to go through all distributions on CPAN, extract out the included modules, and make up a set of indices containing the latest versions, irrespective of who the owner is according to the CPAN/PAUSE indices (search.cpan.org does this, to an extent). However, using such a set of indices to install a module with CPAN/CPANPLUS would break the fundamental assumption of unique module names, and would lead to a situation whereby, for example, one author can overwrite another author's module just by uploading a later version to CPAN. There are plans in perl6 to address this - see, for example, CPAN, Perl6, and module versioning - but for now, module ownership/co-ownership is a safeguard put in place to prevent such a situation.

In reply to Re^3: howto install modules by randyk
in thread howto install modules by powerman

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