On Fri, 26 Mar 2010, Andy Lester wrote:
Absolutely. This factual info would ideally look like this:
"Of the 17,000 distros on CPAN, there are 8,000 that have versions more than a year
older than the most recent one. If those distros with versions more than a year out of
date were purged, the number of files would decrease from 200,000 to 120,000. This would
save 7GB out of the 12GB that a full CPAN mirror takes now. Removing that 7GB would mean
Benefit X to mirror owners."
Without that, how can module authors be bothered to care?
If you don't mind me interjecting, I still can't be bothered to care. We
have basically a 12GB data set, and we're worried about that? I see that a
small barrier to bringing on new mirrors on constrained pipes, but
ultimately that's not that big a deal. Hell, there's single versions of
some Linux distros that are bigger than that.
End sum: I personally don't think this is the most pressing issue facing
CPAN. Just issue a best practices guide to all the module authors (or
include it as on-line documentation in PAUSE) and be done with it.
--Arthur Corliss
Live Free or Die
