I heard a weird thing on the Discovery Channel's show on Gravity. "If you drill a tube thru the earth, from any 2 surface points, and let gravity alone move a frictionless sled thru it, it takes exactly 42 minutes to get to the other side. Paris--New York, or Beijing--Washington..... the math of gravity always results in 42 minutes.

There is something profound in that. :-)

As far as your errors trying to get to cpan, I see the same thing right now, but it propably is a computer failure somewhere..... and since this is all volunteer services, don't expect it to be fixed within 42 minutes.

42 minutes and 12 seconds to be more exact. Here is the underlying math. One interesting feature is that any gravity train trip, from any two points, on any planet (of the same density as earth) will take the same time. One could speculate this is why Deep Thought came up with the answer 42 in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

This does assume that the two points are the same distance from the centre. Which is rarely the case given that planets aren't quite spheres. In fact, if you were to dig a tunnel from London to Lagos and drop something into the hole at the London end, I don't think it would ever reach Lagos. Instead it would get most of the way there and then go back to London.

IIRC this interesting little fact also assumes that the tunnel is straight - a tricky feat to pull off when most of the planet is hot and fluid.

That was interesting, If I search for 'modules' instead of 'all' then it works.

I had a similar issue with search.cpan.org a couple of weeks ago. I thought that if a switched to a new proxy that would help. Unfortunately it seemed the search issue got propagated everywhere. It got fixed later the same day, but it brings out the obvious, "I really depend on CPAN for docs!"

Thanks for the replies.

Re: rebooting, I should have mentioned in the original post that someone else on a different network confirmed the problem before I came to the Monks. So no reboot.

Re: modules vs all, indeed that works! How odd.

Re: 42 minutes, I appreciate the volunteer effort and I don't expect people to Drop Everything(TM) and fix it right this second; but if I ran a site as popular as search.cpan.org I'd want to know ASAP if it's got a headache.

Re: docs, yeah, me too, it's kinda scary how much I've come to rely on CPAN and Google to be "the Perl library" and "the Internet" respectively.

So, back to the original question: how do you think CPAN service problems should best be communicated?

Maybe it's as simple as using a different address for problem reports. Or maybe we should pitch in for professional service monitoring for the Perl services we rely on (whatever "we" means, but I'd pitch in for sure).

The Perl NOC would likely also be responsible for the appointment of mirrors. As I can't replicate your problem and don't find anything on the page, it's likely transient or being worked on.

I guess your suggestion of "professional service monitoring" implies that somebody should write a Perl script to monitor that the search.cpan.org mirrors are up...

So, back to the original question: how do you think CPAN service problems should best be communicated?
As per FAQ: I'm having trouble connecting to search and I think it may be down, whom do I contact?