While playing around with timing some things, I discovered that one of the repositories has a bad PPM::Repositories. ppm returns with this: 
PPM::PPD::init: not a PPD and not a file:
<!-- BEGIN kwiki_screen -->
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/T
+R/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">


<!-- BEGIN kwiki_screen.html -->

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /
+>
  <title>
[snip]

[download]

I tried to chase it down, through ppm, ppm3, and ppm3-bin. From the perldoc on ppm3-bin: 

SYNOPSIS
    Do not run *ppm3-bin* manually. It is meant to be called by the wr
+apper
    program *ppm3*. See ppm3.

[download]
Gee. Considering that all ppm3 does is set some environment variables and call ppm3-bin, what to do?

I played with the repository order with rep up, and finally nailed it down to datetime. According to the Wayback Machine, there were ppd files, but not in a repository format. (But I could be mistaken.)

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

In reply to Re: Speeding Up PPM by QM
in thread Speeding Up PPM by QM

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.