who else read it as CSPAN?
CPAN is 20
11–20 of 39 posts
Re: CPAN is 20
#12A good time to acknowledge that CPAN was a very influential example for internet libraries that came afterward. I got a lot out of it for years, time to say thanks! You guys in the Perl community were awesome and still are! A shout out to CTAN too!
To be honest, it still is. Many of the other ones have yet to catch up with CPAN in terms of richness in eco system and breadth of offered features. For example, i know no (and i may be ignorant) language that has a distributed library testing community.
I was unaware of the distributed library testing community. How does it work, pray tell?
Re: CPAN is 20
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, it still is. Many of the other ones have yet to catch up with CPAN in terms of richness in eco system and breadth of offered features. For example, i know no (and i may be ignorant) language that has a distributed library testing community.
I was unaware of the distributed library testing community. How does it work, pray tell?
Volunteers with lots of different perl versions and OSes run software that monitors CPAN for new uploads, and then automatically downloads them and runs their automated tests, and uploads the results.
Here's more on CPANTesters: http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/WhatIsCPANTesters
And here's an example of the results for a popular module: http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=Moose+2.1600
Re: CPAN is 20
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, it still is. Many of the other ones have yet to catch up with CPAN in terms of richness in eco system and breadth of offered features. For example, i know no (and i may be ignorant) language that has a distributed library testing community.
I was unaware of the distributed library testing community. How does it work, pray tell?
Quite short version:
Almost every perl module has a set of test scripts that can usually be called up by running make test. This happens by default when installing something with CPAN.pm. The output of this can be captured by CPAN.pm and sent on to a receiving server. Said server can be anything, but in almost all cases is the cpantesters metabase server, which integrates the result into a database which contains and summarizes the results of tests for libraries, by library version, operating system and perl version. In addition to people configuring their CPAN.pm that way and sending reports for everything installed, there are also many people who have set up servers that work on testing the newest version of every library uploaded to CPAN.
Re: CPAN is 20
#15How old is metacpan, the site that makes cpan useful?
According to their about page, it is 5 years old. We are a relatively young open source project. In November 2015, MetaCPAN will be 5 years old. It's old enough to have become an important and well utilized part of the Perl world, but it's also young enough to have lots of room to evolve. As you will see we have many ideas and encourage more suggestions.
Yep, that's correct. I still remember when I registered the name. It has grown far beyond anything I had imagined.
The whole CPAN ecosystem (CPAN, CPAN Testers, search.cpan.org, metacpan.org etc) involves a lot of people and a lot of resources. It's not just open source software -- it's open source "software as a service". So you get to push some code and also worry about uptime!
Lots of volunteers and more than a few sponsors make sure the ecosystem keeps on ticking. My thanks to all of them. :)
Re: CPAN is 20
#16My experience from a decade ago was different than most here, I had not so much luck with CPAN.
Many libraries and projects, but most of them alpha or abandoned. It took a lot of time to find stuff that was built well enough for production and was still maintained.
Re: CPAN is 20
#17My experience from a decade ago was different than most here, I had not so much luck with CPAN. Many libraries and projects, but most of them alpha or abandoned. It took a lot of time to find stuff that was built well enough for production and was still maintained.
In that sense CRAN is better maintained. It has to keep up with the changing R environment or it doesn't get included anymore IIRC.
Re: CPAN is 20
#18CPAN is an awesome tool. First, this is a good way to avoid to reinvent the wheel. Second, it's companion, CpanTesters community platform, gives to the authors a damn simple way to test their modules on a huge variety of OS and architectures. These tests are public and will help people to choose distributions according to their needs and quality exigences. Third, it encourage to test and upload modules at early stage…
Seems to me that CPAN would still have a ton of things to teach to new repositories but seems few people look at it.
Re: CPAN is 20
#19A good time to acknowledge that CPAN was a very influential example for internet libraries that came afterward. I got a lot out of it for years, time to say thanks! You guys in the Perl community were awesome and still are! A shout out to CTAN too!
To be honest, it still is. Many of the other ones have yet to catch up with CPAN in terms of richness in eco system and breadth of offered features. For example, i know no (and i may be ignorant) language that has a distributed library testing community.
Trying to build one for Java in my spare time - http://cjan.org
Re: CPAN is 20
#20Are there package formats older than CPAN? Which is the oldest one?
I did some digging and it seems that RPM, DEB etc were created after 1993 so perhaps CPAN could be father of packaging formats.