Monks,

After using GitHub, Google Code and other online coding collaboration tools, CPAN (once a shining jewel in my view) is starting to feel a bit 1990's-ish.

There are some nice tools - bugtracking, annotations, dependency generation, reviews, discussion forums, etc. However, they are not truly integrated into a single interface and -- because of the distributed, mirrored architecture of search.cpan.org -- probably never will be.

Even though CPAN is 100 miles above and beyond what you will find for other languages, we cannot leave well enough alone. I say it's high time we -- as a community -- or someone -- as an individual -- create a replacement for search.cpan.org.

Surely we cannot wait until after Perl6 is ready to begin this. It must happen now.

A shortlist of functionality I would expect (at a minimum would include:

• Listing of Modules/Distributions/Authors (like what we already have)
• Module activity levels - like on GitHub
• Author activity levels - like on GitHub
• The ability to "follow" modules - so you will know when they are updated.
• Discussion forums that:
  • Are faster.
  • More modern.
  • Include the features that thousands of other forums should Just Have.
• Source control - either via SVN, Darcs, Git or what-have-you.
• Forking/Branching/Merging - like on GitHub. Abandoned modules should not be allowed to languish forever. This process could replace the current "Take over a distribution" workflow in PAUSE.

It would also be great to have a kind of Twitter-like thing that you could watch to see things happen in real time. Downloads, test failures, reviews, ratings, forks, etc. We all know that there is a great deal of CPAN activity, but because it's spread out we don't get visibility into what is happening As It Happens.

Yes - I know that some of these features simply Would Not Work under the current architecture. A new architecture will be needed.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build something better than the current search.cpan.org.

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