On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Sander Temme wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I have been meaning to follow up on this ever since that BOF, and am deeply
> annoyed that it has taken me this long.
>
> As a matter of fact, my memory of that BOF session has now faded to a
> considerable extent and I don't feel comfortable even giving a list of
> attendees because I would leave people out.
>
> I have pinned to my office wall the flip-over sheet with notes I took during
> the session and will now transcribe those. If anyone present at the event
> notices I'm leaving something out, please speak up.
>
> Building on my original message below, we discussed what should be
> implemented and how.
[ ... ]
> We discussed CPAN, from which a lot of people blindly and trustingly download
> module upon module, as root. How did this get so trusted? Who is responsible
> for the code? We hear that nobody owns CPAN, and there is no identifiable
> target for any legal action anyone might want to bring. This obviously
> wouldn't fly for the ASF.
Jarkko Hietaniemi, the "CPAN Master Librarian", wrote up
some thoughts on CPAN-like archives at
http://www.cpan.org/misc/ZCAN.html
Most (but not all) activity in CPAN is connected with
Perl modules; for this, PAUSE (http://pause.perl.org/)
is the means by which authors can upload and manage
submissions. The code for PAUSE is available:
ftp://pause.perl.org/pub/PAUSE/PAUSE-code/
> Every module uploaded to the network would come with metadata, including (but
> not limited to):
[ ... ]
In the Perl world, metadata now comes in the form of a
META.yml file:
http://module-build.sourceforge.net/META-spec.html
which is based on YAML:
http://www.yaml.org/
This is one area that the CPAN/PAUSE maintainers emphasize
as being crucial in being able to index and search
effectively.
--
best regards,
randy kobes
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