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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

#31

Post by perigrin »

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.

They actually have had the existing URLs working via `search.mcpan.org` for several years now, this is really just a matter of dropping the `m`.

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

#33

Post by labster »

esaym wrote: post #18

Since metacpan.org has been around, I've always hated search.cpan.org. Case in point, at a previous employer, a contractor was tasked with integrating Jira with an existing hacked together monitoring system in order to 'automatically' create trouble tickets. Not hard to do, but the problem is he just googled 'perl soap' (since the jira api was SOAP). Which lead to a soap package on cpan.org, and it (the google index)…

This doesn't sound like a reason to hate search.cpan.org.

To me, it sounds like your contractor was awfully lazy or underinformed. They didn't do the basic level of due diligence to determine if they had the most recent version of software -- nor were they even aware of the module installers. I don't use Python or Node.js all that much, but at least I'm aware of pip and npm.

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

#34

Post by kbenson »

labster wrote: post #6
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.

My guess at what it's telling us is that the OSS competitor will always win in the long term. I actually enjoy refactoring old Perl code into Modern Perl, but if I can't contribute, I can't help. Metacpan is has a larger community support because we can help out.

> the OSS competitor will always win in the long term.

That's an interesting point, and I've seen it come up more and more in recent years (or even months). It would be interesting to see a survey of major software technologies over time, with proprietary, commercial and open source all represented and see which ones still exist, are still usable in the current ecosystem, and support new features. e.g. operating systems, web servers, mail servers, database servers, CRM solutions, etc. I imagine if you looked at each period at five year intervals from 1993-2008, it would be very telling.

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

#35

Post by perigrin »

gkya wrote: post #23
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 v5.2…

If you're gonna compare to 5.9.2 (a dev version) then the newest Perl 5 is 5.27.11 with 5.28.0-rc1 having dropped after this announcement. Doesn't change the relevance of your point but the internet is a pedantic place.

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

#36

Post by ianbicking »

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.

PyPI was also recently reimplemented from scratch. It's not so odd.

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

#38

Post by gkya »

perigrin wrote: post #35
gkya wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v5.2…

If you're gonna compare to 5.9.2 (a dev version) then the newest Perl 5 is 5.27.11 with 5.28.0-rc1 having dropped after this announcement. Doesn't change the relevance of your point but the internet is a pedantic place.

Thanks (I don't know much about perl versions really, just did a /2005 in perlhist).

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

#39

Post by kbenson »

testplzignore wrote: post #20

Not a knock against the people who created metacpan, but it is interesting how much faster search.cpan.org is than metacpan.org when displaying basically identical information on module pages. The page load time is consistently about 5 to 10 times faster on search.cpan.org on the first load of a page, though subsequent loads are faster on metacpan, so they must have some caching in front.

My experience was always the complete opposite, but I've avoided cpan.org in lieu of metacpan for years now because metacpan has a better experience overall. It likely changed over the years as the majority of Perl programmers switched to metacpan, which seems to go back around 7 years at least. According to alexa,com there's been a large shift in the last year or so, and metacpan.org is serving something like 3-4 times the amount of traffic. Additionally, each page is displaying much more info (such as dependencies, cpantesters platform testing statistics, etc).

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

#40

Post by ccozan »

jasonjayr wrote: post #24
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.

I still have the Mason book, can see it in my shelf in front of me!
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