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The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org

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Re: The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org

#21

Post by justinator »

kyoob wrote: post #2

This is truly a down moment, to be sure, but it's pretty telling that the site became too hard to maintain because it's written in old Perl. I'm not a Perl hater. I like Perl! I got my start in Perl and spoke at a YAPC::NA a few years ago. It's telling, is all I'm saying. It tells us something.

That, sometimes a huge, throw the baby out with the bathwater, rewrite by a separate team (via MetaCPAN) is the correct way to go to move forward?

Or, that CPAN's greatest worth is the modules themselves and not the search engine of the modules?

What's it tell you?

Anyways, thanks for all the search.cpan.org memories. I feel that I have memories pre 2002 of the site (maybe I'm wrong?)

Re: The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org

#22

Post by isostatic »

kyoob wrote: post #2

This is truly a down moment, to be sure, but it's pretty telling that the site became too hard to maintain because it's written in old Perl. I'm not a Perl hater. I like Perl! I got my start in Perl and spoke at a YAPC::NA a few years ago. It's telling, is all I'm saying. It tells us something.

How great perl is, how long it lasts with minimal effort. Not many active sites from that era that still functioning, let alone ones maintained by 1 person.

By comparison, Google was still in beta at that stage, youtube was still 6 years away, and Mark Zuckerburg was 14.

Re: The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org

#23

Post by gkya »

kyoob wrote: post #2

This is truly a down moment, to be sure, but it's pretty telling that the site became too hard to maintain because it's written in old Perl. I'm not a Perl hater. I like Perl! I got my start in Perl and spoke at a YAPC::NA a few years ago. It's telling, is all I'm saying. It tells us something.

How many languages haven't gotten any new features since 2005? Even C has seen some improvements. Python got one incompatible update openly, and some others covertly (syntax changes like f" and @-operator, where some.py written with python 3.x can cause syntax errors w/ python 3.(x-1)). Perl 6 was released. C++ has seen a couple standards revisions. A couple new ECMAScript standards were issued. Newest Perl 5 is v5.26, in 2005 it was 5.9.2 (see perlhist(1)), if you have so many new and stable stuff available, maintaining something 9 years old is a burden even if it was perfect.

Re: The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org

#24

Post by jasonjayr »

jandrese wrote: post #19

2005 era Perl is still Perl 5. It might not be using the more modern extensions, but it's not like it was written in Perl 3 or something. I wonder if they were building the pages in the CGI module directly? That was pretty common back then but has been depreciated for a few years now, although it still works for now.

In 2005 mod_perl was a pretty popular way to build a perl site. It's almost certainly using mod_perl under the hood.

Re: The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org

#25

Post by joslin01 »

isostatic wrote: post #22
kyoob wrote: post #2

This is truly a down moment, to be sure, but it's pretty telling that the site became too hard to maintain because it's written in old Perl. I'm not a Perl hater. I like Perl! I got my start in Perl and spoke at a YAPC::NA a few years ago. It's telling, is all I'm saying. It tells us something.

How great perl is, how long it lasts with minimal effort. Not many active sites from that era that still functioning, let alone ones maintained by 1 person. By comparison, Google was still in beta at that stage, youtube was still 6 years away, and Mark Zuckerburg was 14.

No post body was provided.

Re: The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org

#26

Post by theclaw »

Sorry to see search.cpan.org go, I don't write much perl nowadays so only just discovered metacpan, which seems like a big step forward. It is appropriate that there would be more than one way to do it.

Still, I pored over search.cpan.org for many long hours as a kid building summer projects. The ability to browse the package source was invaluable to me on a dial up link. Here's to all those that worked on it.

Re: The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org

#27

Post by djsumdog »

Klathmon wrote: post #10
portmanteaufu wrote: post #3

From the article: > In recent years maintenance has become a burden. Most of the site is running 2005 era Perl code. Luckily, there is now a viable alternative: MetaCPAN.org. The MetaCPAN team has been getting ready for the transition and is nearly ready to take over. Shortly, a link will be added to all pages on search.cpan.org to inform users of the upcoming change. After about a month, all traffic will be redirect…

>Existing search.cpan.org links will continue to work after the transition. They should get a lot more credit for this. Linkrot sucks, and I'm sure the effort that was required to pull off maintaining those links is going to pay off greatly for many for years to come.

I concur. Rewrite rules for projects like this can get super crazy. Kudos to the devs/admins/community who put in the effort.

Re: The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org

#28

Post by orbitur »

joslin01 wrote: post #25
isostatic wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How great perl is, how long it lasts with minimal effort. Not many active sites from that era that still functioning, let alone ones maintained by 1 person. By comparison, Google was still in beta at that stage, youtube was still 6 years away, and Mark Zuckerburg was 14.

The first section says the site was started in 1999.

Re: The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org

#29

Post by justinator »

jandrese wrote: post #19

2005 era Perl is still Perl 5. It might not be using the more modern extensions, but it's not like it was written in Perl 3 or something. I wonder if they were building the pages in the CGI module directly? That was pretty common back then but has been depreciated for a few years now, although it still works for now.

Also to note that 2005 is the year "Perl Best Practices" (the book) was published. That was a big turning point (at least for me) in how to write much more maintainable Perl code.

Re: The end of an era: Saying goodbye to search.cpan.org

#30

Post by lkrubner »

kyoob wrote: post #2

This is truly a down moment, to be sure, but it's pretty telling that the site became too hard to maintain because it's written in old Perl. I'm not a Perl hater. I like Perl! I got my start in Perl and spoke at a YAPC::NA a few years ago. It's telling, is all I'm saying. It tells us something.

How many PHP websites still work, if they have been in unmaintained since 2005? Can you imagine how many bugs you can find in a 2005 WordPress site? Or PHPNuke?
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