/modules/by-module not indexing new modules?

[milki]

Hi,

As a FreeBSD port maintainer, its nice to have
/modules/by-module/MODULE-VERSION.tar.gz available. However, recently I
have discovered that the it hasn't been updated for the ones I'm
interested in.

For example, DBIx-Class is at version 0.08127.
ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/CPAN/modules/by-module/DBIx/ only contains up to
0.08124 posted at 12/22/10.

Is the indexing broken?

[milki]

Post by milki
Hi,
As a FreeBSD port maintainer, its nice to have
/modules/by-module/MODULE-VERSION.tar.gz available. However, recently I
have discovered that the it hasn't been updated for the ones I'm
interested in.

Hear, hear. I did not expect that anybody was seriously using it.

Yes, it is the default method for a perl FreeBSD port to retrieve a
package. The alternative is to ../authors/id/, but the url root as at
/modules/by-module

Post by milki
For example, DBIx-Class is at version 0.08127.
ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/CPAN/modules/by-module/DBIx/ only contains up to
0.08124 posted at 12/22/10.
Is the indexing broken?

PAUSE still has the directory maintained but ftp.perl.org is not
mirroring it. Maybe the mirroring there can be restarted, I'm not in the
position to check that.
We are tending to remove the whole directory because it's an insane way
of maintaining information. The canonical way of indexing takes place in
.../CPAN/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz
But if people rely on the symlink tree, maybe we should keep it up. The
two directories by-modules and by-category contain 240000 symlinks and
diretories. Compared to the 1 MB of the 02packages.details.txt.gz file
it's a monstrosity.

I don't believe this will be inhibitive to FreeBSD ports, but removing
the directly will break old ports. If new ports are made with whats in
02packages.details.txt.gz, then there won't be any problems. Port
maintainers just need to be aware of this decision.

I'm cc'ing freebsd-perl so that others can share their input as well. I
started an original thread with subject:
MASTER_SITES/MASTER_SITE_SUBDIR for perl ports

[milki]

I submitted a patch to portlint so now it does not give a warning when
perl port authors specify the authors subdirectory in order to retrieve
CPAN packages. The perl port committers were already suggesting to port
maintainers to ignore the error.

So that leaves one small hurdle out of the way.

[(Andreas J. Koenig)]

Post by milki
Hi,
As a FreeBSD port maintainer, its nice to have
/modules/by-module/MODULE-VERSION.tar.gz available. However, recently I
have discovered that the it hasn't been updated for the ones I'm
interested in.

Hear, hear. I did not expect that anybody was seriously using it.

Post by milki
For example, DBIx-Class is at version 0.08127.
ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/CPAN/modules/by-module/DBIx/ only contains up to
0.08124 posted at 12/22/10.
Is the indexing broken?

PAUSE still has the directory maintained but ftp.perl.org is not
mirroring it. Maybe the mirroring there can be restarted, I'm not in the
position to check that.

We are tending to remove the whole directory because it's an insane way
of maintaining information. The canonical way of indexing takes place in
.../CPAN/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz

But if people rely on the symlink tree, maybe we should keep it up. The
two directories by-modules and by-category contain 240000 symlinks and
diretories. Compared to the 1 MB of the 02packages.details.txt.gz file
it's a monstrosity.

Opinions welcome.

[milki]

We are tending to remove the whole directory because it's an insane way
of maintaining information. The canonical way of indexing takes place in
.../CPAN/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz

Is /modules/by-author also planning to be phased out?

[(Andreas J. Koenig)]

Post by milki

We are tending to remove the whole directory because it's an insane way
of maintaining information. The canonical way of indexing takes place in
.../CPAN/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz

Is /modules/by-author also planning to be phased out?

That is just one symlink:

***@pause:/home/ftp/pub/PAUSE/modules$ ls -l by-authors
lrwxrwxrwx 1 500 root 10 2006-03-26 09:30 by-authors -> ../authors

And authors is the real thing. Under modules we have only a dozen files,
thousands of directories and symlinks.