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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

#71
cpan.org is great! it will be missed!

a couple days ago searching for some tool, i wanted to check some source at npmjs and to my surprise npmjs does not have a "download any-module.tar.gz" and neither has an option to "view the source" code like old cpan does.

i went to #nodejs to ask for help and guys there told me to install "npm" to download the source from npmjs module i wanted to see. NOOOO... i dont want to install npm, i just want to see how it was done. Cant i just click "download source" at the npm page ? NO. Cant i just click "view source" at the npm page ? NO. Just install npm and install the module so you can see the code... COME ON....

cpan.org so old and still so up-to-date!

perl so old and still so up-to-date!

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

#72
post #58

Sad news. Hopefully a replacement will fill its place and provide comprehensive public access to our government broadcasting network's archives.

> Hopefully a replacement will fill its place and provide comprehensive public access to our government broadcasting network's archives.

Is this a joke? That's not what CPAN is about. For what CPAN is for, there already is a replacement, MetaCPAN.

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

#73
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.

It's definitely an end of an era. Some other telling factors. The level of activity/projects in perl compared to python. http://twimgs.com/ddj/images/article/2014/0114/Tiobe1.gif http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-rise-and-fall-of-languages-in... Or the fact that perl isn't even relevant enough to be part of a comparison of major script-like languages. https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/growth... But t…

Amazing how, a decade or more after the python-perl skirmishes, some still ... still ... cannot give up their attacks on perl, using the mask of accounts created in the last day.

Perl is still alive, well, and growing. It's not the currently cool language d'jour like qw(Scala go F# rust ...). But people are shipping code with it, using it successfully for what it does best.

Haters gonna hate, and one should generally avoid feeding the several hour old trolls. Their trolling notwithstanding, rumors of perl's demise have been greatly exaggerated.

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

#74
post #13
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be more about MetaCPAN just being better. Or the maintainer looking to move on for other reasons. Not worth the maintenance for a variety of reasons other than that it is made out of Perl. I’m assuming MetaCPAN is written in Perl, at least in part. But I’m on mobile and I don’t want to research right now; I could be wrong. Edit: also, 2005 era Python or Ruby, for a website, would likely be unpleasant to main…

The backend API is indeed (modern) Perl and the repository is here: https://github.com/metacpan/metacpan-api

As someone who works with perl daily, what's "modern" perl?

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

#76
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The backend API is indeed (modern) Perl and the repository is here: https://github.com/metacpan/metacpan-api

As someone who works with perl daily, what's "modern" perl?

Not the origin but a decent definition can be found in http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/index.html

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

#77
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd number releases are dev releases, even number are production releases. After 5.12 or so releases became time-boxed so that there is a new even release every year around this time (hence 5.28.0-rc1 dropping now, and in a year 5.30.0 will drop).

I guess you mean "9" in 5.9.2 as the part that tells dev or production, no?

Yes. Because of a naming … inconsistency … several core developers and major CPAN contributes have moved the 5 into the name of the language. So Perl5 version 9.2 or Perl5 version 28.0-rc1. Because we are often quirky nostalgic humans we usually leave the 5 where it traditionally has been at the start of the version string.

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

#78
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.

I am a Perl hater, but mostly from having to dig into 10 year old legacy code for apps that nobody has touched for 5 years that still run . So like on the one hand, old perl is basically unmaintainable punctuation vomit, but on the other hand, there’s a lot of 10 year old perl code out there just chugging a long, which is nothing to sneeze at.

10 year old legacy apps that no one has touched in 5 years were written after S.C.O was let go. 10 year old code in any language kinda sucks.

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

#79
post #75

This was the granddaddy package manager. Before gem or npm or maven or pip. It was the gold standard for sharing open source libraries and was the best reason for using Perl for a long time.

To be fair this was just a search engine for the package archive. The archive, it’s several clients, and alternative search engine, are still doing fine.

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but the first Perl project I started in 1999 in my dorm room had its latest, major release two days ago. I've never thought of maintaining your own Perl code as impossible. And I'm no wizard. I've honestly wondered if maintaining someone else's forgotten Perl code, modernizing it, and getting it so that'll it'll run for another x years isn't all that bad of a niche job.

If someone is being paid to modernize a perl app, they almost certainly are intended to rewrite it in another language entirely.

No, that’s just bullshit. It’s very easy to write Modern Perl, and most companies with large Perl codebases break their codebases into service based architectures and then rewrite them bit by bit.
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