**** rt.cpan.org, the bugtracker used by nearly 80% of all CPAN modules [1], is going to be shut down on 1st March this year [2]; 39 days from when I write this email.
****
I am rather concerned about this, as there doesn't appear to be any
sort of co-ordinated bailout plan or migration of the *huge amount* of
CPAN modules this is about to affect.
I am furthermore concerned at the total lack of discussion or response
that has so far been generated; aside from Karen Etheridge I haven't
seen any noise of upset being generated at all. Nor am I aware of any
sort of effort to handle what will become a huge outage of a major
component of the CPAN ecosystem.
I personally have 189 modules in need of migration - somehow. As yet
I have no clue what I am going to do about it. Existing bugs need to be
moved somewhere else (and I have no clue how I'm going to fix up URLs
that currently point to those, in code comments, documentation, blog
posts, ... anywhere else), and a new for users to report new bugs needs
to exist. Of special note are the numerous "in progress" tickets I have
across my distributions, containing ongoing discussions about design
issues and the like. To say that I am "concerned" is an understatement;
I am fairly close to panicing about this.
I am quite sure I am but the smallest tip of the iceberg here. Every
time I mention it on Freenode's #perl or irc.perl.org's #p5p there are
always new folks who were totally unaware of this fact. This is going
to hit lots of people in a very hard surprise.
I am therefore interested to know if anyone has any sort of thoughts or
plan on what to do about this; either
a) Attempts to take over maintenance of the system as it stands, or
b) Find an alternative location and implement some sort of
mass-bailout in that direction.
To emphasise again: in 39 days time the bug tracker used by nearly 80%
of all of CPAN is going to be shut down and become unavailable for
either historic or newly-reported bugs. We *need* to find a solution in
that time. It would be great if we all went the same way, thus making
the lives of users (and metacpan.org) a lot simpler, rather than all
scattering in 50 different ways, which will cause a huge splintering of
what has been a very coherent service so far.
1: Add the "known to be RT" and "unknown" categories of
https://cpan.rocks/; because metacpan.org defaults to RT in the
latter case.
2: https://log.perl.org/2020/12/rtcpanorg-sunset.html
--
Paul "LeoNerd" Evans
leon...@leonerd.org.uk | https://metacpan.org/author/PEVANS
http://www.leonerd.org.uk/ | https://www.tindie.com/stores/leonerd/
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