I got curious about what the growth of the CPAN looked like recently. I knew there'd been a few things done quite a while back, but hadn't seen anything recently.

Anyway, I put together a complete file index of the backpan and ground out some graphs, which show some interesting things. Files, active authors and distributions are all increasing. The rate at which new distributions have been added has been pretty flat. The rate at which the CPAN gains new authors seems to be decreasing, however.

A friend of mine suggests that this "involve[s] the community getting better over the last several years at corralling many hackers together into large, frequently updated projects, which then get stored in the CPAN under a single username".

In reply to CPAN Growth by turner

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