[Slackbuilds-users] Batch update to Perl homepage/download URLs

[Chris Novakovic]

Last week it was announced that the CPAN search site, search.cpan.org,
will shut down on June 25th [1]. search.cpan.org operates as both a
HTML-based documentation viewer for Perl modules and a CPAN mirror, so a
lot of Perl SlackBuilds use search.cpan.org URLs as homepage and/or
download links. Although there's a contingency plan in place to redirect
requests for resources on search.cpan.org to their MetaCPAN [2]
equivalents, this doesn't yet work for all resources (nor is it clear
whether it will), and it hasn't been announced for how long the
redirection mechanism will stay in place. In any case, the message from
the Perl NOC is clear: start using MetaCPAN in place of search.cpan.org.

On a similar note, it's a common complaint on this list that the
download link for a Perl module SlackBuild has stopped working. This
invariably turns out to be because the tarball was hosted on the primary
CPAN mirror, www.cpan.org, and the author has deleted it because it's an
obsolete version of the module (which they're encouraged to by the PAUSE
admins). Only two mirrors keep a complete history of CPAN: BackPAN [3]
and MetaCPAN.

This seems like a good time to stop using {search,www}.cpan.org on SBo
in favour of MetaCPAN. 273 SlackBuilds in master currently contain
{search,www}.cpan.org URLs in some form. Rather than spamming hundreds
of individual SBo maintainers with requests to update links, I thought
it'd be less time-consuming for everyone involved if I did this en
masse, so I've replaced affected URLs with their MetaCPAN equivalents in
all *.SlackBuild, *.info, README and slack-desc files. The MetaCPAN URLs
tend to be longer than their search.cpan.org counterparts, which in some
cases pushes lines in slack-desc files over the length limit; in these
cases, I've shortened the URL (by linking to the Perl module
distribution's release page instead of a specific page in the
documentation) or moved the URL to a new line.

The changes (one commit per SlackBuild, as standard) can be pulled from
the master branch of:

  https://github.com/chrisnovakovic/slackbuilds

[1] https://log.perl.org/2018/05/goodbye-search-dot-cpan-dot-org.html
[2] https://metacpan.org
[3] http://backpan.cpantesters.org