Re^3: howto install modules

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.

Comment on Re^3: howto install modules

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Re^4: howto install modules by powerman (Friar) on Oct 11, 2005 at 02:21 UTC
Thanks again, excelent explanation. But I don't see relation between these two tasks: assurance in unique module names and access to modules. For example, search.cpan.org use different way for accessing modules because it doesn't show Smart::Comment on http://search.cpan.org/~autrijus/ (there no 0.01 version of Smart::Comments on search.cpan.org at all) but show all Conway's versions. Anyway, thanks again for your answers. Situation is now clear for me: problem with Smart::Comments and CPAN.pm has deep roots in CPAN architecture which nobody will try to fix until Perl6. :) It's easy to workaround this issue by using manually prepared module list from CPAN's directory listings, but this may result in some other unusual bugs.	[reply]

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Re^4: howto install modules
by powerman (Friar) on Oct 11, 2005 at 02:21 UTC

But I don't see relation between these two tasks: assurance in unique module names and access to modules. For example, search.cpan.org use different way for accessing modules because it doesn't show Smart::Comment on http://search.cpan.org/~autrijus/ (there no 0.01 version of Smart::Comments on search.cpan.org at all) but show all Conway's versions.

Anyway, thanks again for your answers. Situation is now clear for me: problem with Smart::Comments and CPAN.pm has deep roots in CPAN architecture which nobody will try to fix until Perl6. :) It's easy to workaround this issue by using manually prepared module list from CPAN's directory listings, but this may result in some other unusual bugs.

[reply]