>>>>> On Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:32:11 +0100, Dave Messina >>>>> <david.mess...@sbc.su.se> said:
> Hi, > I'm one of the core developers for the BioPerl project. > We've had a persistent problem with users grabbing outdated versions > of our distributions from CPAN. For example, the distribution > bioperl-1.4.tar.gz is deprecated and is on backpan, as seen here: > http://backpan.perl.org/authors/id/B/BI/BIRNEY/ > and yet in a search for bioperl through the cpan command-line > interface, bioperl-1.4.tar.gz turns up almost at the top of the list: > cpan[2]> i /bioperl/ > Bundle Bundle::BioPerl (CRAFFI/Bundle-BioPerl-2.1.8.tar.gz) > Distribution BIRNEY/bioperl-1.4.tar.gz > Distribution BIRNEY/bioperl-db-0.1.tar.gz > [..snip..] > 16 items found > Is there a way to prevent our old distributions from appearing in CPAN > search results? > It would be fine, for example, if they were removed from CPAN and > BackPAN completely (we have them archived elsewhere). I'll show you how to debug this situation. I come to the same conclusion as the other posters who suggested that bioperl-1.4.tar.gz be removed from CPAN. In the cpan shell you have the 'd' command (mnemonic: distribution) that tells you something about a single uploaded file. cpan> d BIRNEY/bioperl-1.4.tar.gz Distribution id = B/BI/BIRNEY/bioperl-1.4.tar.gz CPAN_USERID BIRNEY (Ewan Birney <bir...@sanger.ac.uk>) CONTAINSMODS Bio::DB::GFF::Adaptor::memory_iterator Bio::Root::Global UPLOAD_DATE 2003-12-23 The for debugging purposes interesting line is CONTAINSMODS. The two modules listed there (Bio::DB::GFF::Adaptor::memory_iterator and Bio::Root::Global) have since been removed from the bioperl distro, so bioperl-1.4 is the last remaining copy of them. This is the reason why bioperl-1.4 is still known to the index used by the cpan shell. If later versions of bioperl would have kept the two modules, it would have disappeared from the index. That said, searching with 'i' is always only a second-best idea because it combines the search for authors, modules, and distros. A better targetting is achieved with the use of the 'm' command to search for a module, like cpan> m Bio::Perl Module id = Bio::Perl CPAN_USERID CJFIELDS (Christopher Fields <cjfie...@bioperl.org>) CPAN_VERSION 1.006001 CPAN_FILE C/CJ/CJFIELDS/BioPerl-1.6.1.tar.gz UPLOAD_DATE 2009-09-29 INST_FILE (not installed) HTH, -- andreas
