Planet Perl is going dormant. This will be the last post there for a while.
Why? There are better ways to get your Perl blog fix these days.
You might enjoy some of the following:
Will Planet Perl awaken again in the future? It might! The universe is a big place, filled with interesting places, people and things. You never know what might happen, so keep your towel handy.
CPAN has gotten its first real update in a while tonight; the content is from the cpanorg git repository.
We tried to get the FAQ cleaned up a bit (though there's plenty of work left) and Leo Lapworth pretty heroically also did a first pass on cleaning up the ports page.
You might also notice a search box for search.cpan.org which we find appropriate, a list of recently uploaded modules on the homepage and a new page on how to mirror CPAN.
If you read the latter page, you'll see that the master mirror is now cpan-rsync.perl.org::CPAN (rsync only). In the coming weeks we'll work on encouraging the CPAN mirrors to switch to mirror from here to ease the load on FUnet, the sponsor of the master mirror for the last 15 years.
Work is also coming along well on the instant update mirroring system.
- ask
You may recently have received an email that looks like the one below. In poor English, it asks for your "CPAN password" and birthday. We're pretty sure that none of you would actually have replied, but if you did, you've been caught by a phishing attack. Change your password ASAP!
We will never-ever-ever ask for your password via email.
Our friends at pobox.com have produced a great summary of phishing.
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network Support Desk
ATTN:
This is to inform you that we are carrying out a site upgrade, as a
mailbox Subscriber, we are carrying out a (inactive email-accounts)
Clean-up process to enable service upgrade efficiency.
Please be informed that we will delete all mail accounts that are non
functioning. You are to provide your mail account details as
follows(This will confirm your Cpan mailbox Login/usage Frequency):
*User name:
*Password:
*Date of birth:
Any user who fails to send the above information will be regarded as an illegal
user and will Have his/her account deleted from our DATA BASE and we will not
be responsible for the loss Of your account.
Thanks for using Cpan Email service as it is toward Serving you better
Copyright © 2010 Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, Inc. All rights reserved.
The list of CPAN mirrors have for ages been published in the MIRRORED.BY file. The format was good back when just parsing a text file was the common data exchange format (and I believe the "master file" was indeed the same file).
Now this file is output by a small program from another data source[1], so Henk Penning (the ever patient and hard working maintainer of the mirrors list) added a JSON export. If you are making a tool that needs the CPAN mirrors list (and you are able to load a JSON file), it might be easier to use the new mirrors.json file.
- ask
[1] The master data source is actually also a JSON file ...
15 years ago Jarkko Hietaniemi started CPAN; now arguably the most important feature of Perl. For all that time the canonical CPAN has been hosted at FUnet, with (now more than 600) mirrors around the world. Having made much of my living using Perl I'm incredibly grateful to Jarkko and FUnet for having built and maintained this incredible resource for such a long time.
A few months ago Jarkko started passing the baton for looking after CPAN on to others in the community and as part of that we at perl.org are taking over the task of being the "master mirror" for CPAN. Currently almost 500 of the CPAN mirrors are mirroring straight from FUnet which is an incredible resource drain for the master mirror.
The new system will be using the rrr tool for rapid mirroring to a set of "tier 1" mirrors so we more easily can scale to support anyone who wants to mirror CPAN. File::Rsync::Mirror::Recent is already in use by some of the mirrors to get "instant" updates from PAUSE. Andreas König (the inventor and long time maintainer of PAUSE) is working on some improvements to make it work better for cpan.org in general.
We're also working on getting things in place so the static pages on cpan.org more easily can be maintained and updated by the community.
If you are interested in helping with testing the mirroring process or anything else, please subscribe to the cpan-workers mailing list.
- Ask
We're celebrating the day after 10/10/10 by rebooting many of the perl.org servers. You may notice some unavailability of perl.org services over the next few hours as we perform rolling reboots.
We're having a brief outage of some services this Sunday evening (or Monday early early morning in Europe) to resize a file system, run fsck etc on one of the servers.
update (9.10pm PST) Woah - those disks are slow. System is starting up again now; all affected services should be back again shortly.
Thsi is reposted from the CPAN Testers blog:
As of this weekend, the final switch to turn off the SMTP gateway for CPAN Testers was flipped. You can no longer post anything to the old cpan-testers mailing list, and any attempts now will result in a bounce message.
Our thanks to Robert and Ask over at the Perl NOC for looking after us all these years, and for being very patient with us while we got the HTTP gateway up and running over the last 9 months.
As a consequence, anyone wishing to still be a part of the CPAN Testers community, now needs to upgrade their test environments, to use the latest smokers and associated libraries. In the main this will involve a simple upgrade of your smoker client and the installation of 4 specific modules (which in turn will install any additional prerequisites needed). You will then need to acquire a metabase profile. For full details of the steps necessary please see the Quick Start page on the CPAN Testers Wiki.
For those casual testers, the upgrade will initially involve some manual intervention, although we hope to automate this as soon as we can. If you do have any problems, or are confused by any of the instructions, please post to the cpan-testers-discuss mailing list, where the developers and other experienced testers can help you.
The end of an era.
A bad cable (or switch port, we haven't entirely figured that out yet) made the perl.org sites be down for about an hour this afternoon. All should be well again.
If you submit CPAN Testers reports via email, you may receive an email that looks like the following:
Thanks for submitting a test report to CPAN Testers!
On September 1st, 2010, we will be disabling email submissions as part of the migration to CPAN Testers 2.0. You must switch over to the HTTP based submission mechanism before that date (metabase transport), or all your test reports will be rejected.
For more information, please see the documentation: http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/QuickHowToCT20
For more information on CPAN Testers in general, please visit http://static.cpantesters.org/
Please heed the warning, because in a little over three weeks, we will be turning off the inbound email gateway, and we really would like to continue to receive your module test reports.
Since Tuesday 6th June, 16:00 (CEST), profane.mongueurs.net is temporarily down because of a thermal problem in the datacenter hosting it. Most services have been migrated to spectre.mongueurs.net in order to insure continuity of service:
Some services may be unavailable during this period.
Apologies for the troubles.
Feel free to mail <sebastien @ aperghis . net> if you have any further questions.
(Post by Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni)
