[Slackbuilds-users] A request to pull from my metacpan branch.

[Zachary Storer]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 05:35:46AM +0200, Thomas Morper wrote:
> I don't get this. The other thread mentioned a total of six SlackBuilds 
> having non-working download links. Yet this branch will touch and change 
> around 650, completely ignoring the respective maintainers who might have 
> a reason for preferring search.cpan.org to metacpan.org and sticking to 
> the download links either of them provide.
> 
> Besides... a broken link often is an indicator for a SlackBuild in 
> neglect. It's better when these get reported on the mailing list than 
> having a nicely working download link for a version that's missing 
> important bug or security fixes.

It seems to me that many people in the perl community have been finding
search.cpan.org to be continuously unreliable. According to the
following stackoverflow comment by brian d foy, it is basically run by one person,
Grahm Barr, and the source code for search.cpan.org is not available.
As stated in the article you may contact Grahm Barr directly if you have
questions.
The stackoverflow link is here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23736052/whats-happening-with-search-cpan-org-and-how-to-install-an-redirector

Contrast this with metacpan.org which is run by a team of people, and is
opensource / free software. This allows members of the perl community
to get involved with quickly fixing bugs.

If you like I can site more sources on why metacpan.org should be used
instead of search.cpan.org for the HOMEPAGE, but I am about to go to
class soon, and I wanted to get this email out this morning. =)

For the download links, I'm using what mst on freenode #perl suggested
which is what CPAN.pm does itself. I'm using www.cpan.org. I'm *not*
using metacpan in my latest branch for download links. I would argue
that www.cpan.org, and backpan.perl.org, are currently the most reliable
sources for up-to-date perl module downloads. According to my chat with mst on
freenode #perl, using www.cpan.org rather than search.cpan.org or
metacpan.org for DOWNLOAD would follow more of the slackware philosophy
of doing things right.

I'm not only changing the 300 or so perl SlackBuilds only because of the
above reasons, but I'm changing them mainly because SlackBuilds users
including myself have experienced dead links due, not to a maintainer
who is neglecting the SlackBuild, but due to search.cpan.org giving dead
links. The problem is with search.cpan.org, although I do agree that
many perl SlackBuilds have been neglected, that is a separate issue.

Anyway, thanks! If you guys have more questions or concerns please let
me know. I would like to see the best for the perl SlackBuilds.

Thanks,

-

Zac
---
Zachary Storer
zacts on irc