On 3/21/26 09:31, James E Keenan wrote:
Having a problem which first becomes apparent running the 'cpan' shell,
but then points toward the cpan.org infrastructure.
Yesterday I installed perl-5.43.9 on by two servers (Linux and FreeBSD).
Here I present data from FreeBSD:
```
[perlmonger: perl-5.43.9] $ ls -l bin/perl bin/cpan
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jkeenan jkeenan 8418 Mar 20 14:56 bin/cpan
-rwxr-xr-x 2 jkeenan jkeenan 4080848 Mar 20 14:56 bin/perl
$ ./bin/perl -v | head -2 | tail -1
This is perl 5, version 43, subversion 9 (v5.43.9) built for amd64-
freebsd-thread-multi
$ ./bin/cpan -v
./bin/cpan script version 1.678, CPAN.pm version 2.38
```
I then installed Task::CPAN::Reporter against that perl (including a
trial release of Net-SSLeay-1.95_001) and then proceeded to generate
CPANtester reports for over 500 distros on each platform.
I subsequently received email indicating that some of the problems I
reported had already been fixed. I went back to those new perl
installations and tried to use the `cpan` shell to install the updated
distros.
```
$ cd $TESTINGDIR/perl-5.43.9
$ ./bin/cpan
cpan[1]> reload index
Reading '/home/jkeenan/.cpan/Metadata'
Database was generated on Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:41:01 GMT
Fetching with HTTP::Tiny:
https://cpan.org/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
Reading '/home/jkeenan/.cpan/sources/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz'
............................................................................DONE
Fetching with HTTP::Tiny:
https://cpan.org/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz
Reading '/home/jkeenan/.cpan/sources/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz'
Database was generated on Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:41:01 GMT
Warning: This index file is 39 days old.
Please check the host you chose as your CPAN mirror for staleness.
I'll continue but problems seem likely to happen.
............................................................................DONE
Fetching with HTTP::Tiny:
https://cpan.org/modules/03modlist.data.gz
Reading '/home/jkeenan/.cpan/sources/modules/03modlist.data.gz'
DONE
Writing /home/jkeenan/.cpan/Metadata
```
Note these two lines in the output above:
```
Database was generated on Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:41:01 GMT
Database was generated on Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:41:01 GMT
Warning: This index file is 39 days old.
Please check the host you chose as your CPAN mirror for staleness.
I'll continue but problems seem likely to happen.
```
I get a console beep when that line `Warning: Ths index file is 39 days
old.` appears.
Today, 21 Mar 2026, is 40 days after 09 Feb 2026. Now my *local* CPAN
metadata files are up-to-date:
```
$ ls -l ~/.cpan/Metadata ~/.cpan/sources/modules ~/.cpan/sources/authors
/
-rw-r--r-- 1 jkeenan jkeenan 44358810 Mar 21 13:05 /home/jkeenan/.cpan/
Metadata
/home/jkeenan/.cpan/sources/authors/:
total 273
-rw-r--r-- 1 jkeenan jkeenan 250949 Mar 21 13:05 01mailrc.txt.gz
drwxr-xr-x 28 jkeenan jkeenan 28 May 20 2021 id
/home/jkeenan/.cpan/sources/modules:
total 2549
-rw-r--r-- 1 jkeenan jkeenan 2592931 Mar 21 13:05
02packages.details.txt.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 jkeenan jkeenan 248 Mar 21 13:05 03modlist.data.gz
```
So what it appears is happening is that the files on cpan.org are out-
of-date:
```
https://cpan.org/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
https://cpan.org/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz
```
The problem appears to be that **inside** the local
`02packages.details.txt.gz` file, the `Last-Updated` entry is still 09
Feb 2026.
```
$ zcat ~/.cpan/sources/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz | head
File: 02packages.details.txt
URL: http://www.cpan.org/modules/02packages.details.txt
Description: Package names found in directory $CPAN/authors/id/
Columns: package name, version, path
Intended-For: Automated fetch routines, namespace documentation.
Written-By: PAUSE version 1.005
Line-Count: 270470
Last-Updated: Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:41:01 GMT
A1z::Html 0.04 C/CE/CEEJAY/A1z-Html-0.04.tar.gz
```
So every time I say `reload index` inside the `cpan` shell, I'm getting
the same 40-day-old data every time. I note, for instance, that in
02packages I don't see the latest version of a CPAN distro which I
uploaded on 03 March.
```
$ zgrep -n 'Business::Tax::US' ~/.cpan/sources/modules/02packages.detail
s.txt.gz
30869:Business::Tax::US::Form_1040::Worksheets 0.07 J/JK/JKEENAN/
Business-Tax-US-Form_1040-Worksheets-0.07.tar.gz
```
... whereas metacpan.org correctly has version 0.08 uploaded on March 3.
```
https://metacpan.org/pod/Business::Tax::US::Form_1040::Worksheets
```
Where should this be further reported?
After many hours of head-banging-on-wall, I got the 'cpan' shell on one
of my two servers to DWIM -- though I don't know why it achieved the
result I wanted.
I had to compare the ~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm file on my laptop -- which
was already DWIMming -- with that on my Linux server. I observed
differences in 2 of the key-value pairs:
KVP Laptop (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) Server (Debian)
pushy_https 0 1
urllist 0 [https://cpan.metacpan.org/] 0 [http://www.cpan.org/]
I used 'o conf' to change those 2 values on the server to match the
laptop. I then called 'reload cpan' and 'reload index'. After
committing those changes and exiting the 'cpan' shell, I issued two
commands suggested by mauke on irc.perl.org #p5p:
#####
$ zgrep -n 'Last-Updated'
~/.cpan/sources/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz ; \
perl -MStorable -wE 'my $m = retrieve $ARGV[0]; say $m->{DATE_OF_02}. "
| " . localtime($m->{last_time})' ~/.cpan/Metadata
8:Last-Updated: Sun, 22 Mar 2026 02:17:03 GMT
Sun, 22 Mar 2026 02:17:03 GMT | Sun Mar 22 03:02:16 2026
#####
... which was equivalent to what I was getting on my laptop.
I then attempted to test XML-Parser against perl-5.43.9. For two days I
could only get XML-Parser-2.47. Now I was able to fetch and install
XML-Parser-2.51.
Can anyone explain why these incantations worked?
