Thanks so much everybody for your help and thorough explanations — I really appreciate it. I've contacted the authors of the old distros and asked them to delete via PAUSE.
Dave On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 06:46, Andreas J. Koenig < andreas.koenig.7os6v...@franz.ak.mind.de> wrote: > >>>>> 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 We've had a persistent problem with users grabbing outdated versions 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 >
