On 25/03/2010 09:12, nadim khemir wrote:
I'd agree with Jonas, the only way is to ask authors to clean their own home.
from very official to non official:
- mail all authors (that would also list all those with broken mail
addresses)
- something on perl.org
- ask Perl monger groups to take the subject up
- quick presentation at conferences
- Perlbuzz entry
- any/all of the Perl news site that end up in the many aggregators
- ...
- whine on IRC
- offer a Perl T-shirt with 'YES! I removed all the modules that were
more
than 5 years old on my CPAN.' to all those that do some cleaning (prepare to
heavily invest in a small factory for this one)
I'm not sure all authors know where to find all their modules listed and how
to send them to backpan. I look into my PAUSE account, there are certainly
more ways.
There is no "sending to the backpan", it is automatic. A backpan mirror
is nothing more than a regular mirror for which no deletion occurs upon
upstream removal.
Having CPAN search engines displaying a different background color when there
is too much trash around may make authors aware that something should be done.
Remember, even for slow-moving modules, you should always keep version
n-1 around, so that people can use the diff tools on search.cpan.org to
compare differences. For fast-moving modules, there's nothing wrong with
keeping a year's worth of versions on-line.
If your modules are packaged as part of OS distributions (FreeBSD, the
various Linux flavours, Strawberry), you have to ensure that their
reference version remains available from your directory.
David
--
naked, but wearing blinding lights! were it a pretty girl, she'd be
surrounded as a flame by moths
