In article <20100104154532.ge6...@bestpractical.com>, Jesse Vincent <je...@bestpractical.com> wrote:
> This brings us to "How do we get there from here?" Who are the folks > working on the Perl6 CPAN client? Well, here's what I'm doing: I think the first step is very simple. My interest is porting the Perl 6 module ideas into Perl 5. However, the code or implemention don't matter. Once we know the answer, it's easy to go from whatever I might do in Perl 5 to something in Perl 6. 02packages is actually quite flexible. There's a line in the header that tells consumers what the columns are. Since we've used the same three columns, a lot of stuff has assumed that the order and meaning will always be the same. We fix the current stuff to pay attention to the headers. If we reorder the columns or stick in a new column, nothing breaks. After that, we produce additional indices that include more information, such as the author, a "canonical" flag perhaps, and other stuff. This isn't necessarily something that PAUSE would do. Alternate authorities can make indices. For the past year I've been working with a couple of paying clients to make custom CPAN repositories. I have most of the pieces in place. Think, for instance, about a market segment that wants to only use CPAN as it was on June 1, when their application went into code freeze. I can produce an index that replicates that. That's not the same thing as saving the PAUSE index since dists disappear arbitrarily. Once we have the index, we have a way to ask for what's available, say, for CGI.pm. That's easy, in the sense that you don't have to draw too much on a whiteboard, and not so bad in the pause and CPAN.pm code for those of us who have our noses in there constantly. Okay, all of that is step one and it's something I'm working on. Step two is figuring out how to decide which all of the things that are available are the most suitable. That's where a lot of people argue endlessy in mailing lists, then Andreas or Jarkko or somebody tells us the answer.
