Hi: I'm not sure where else to send this, so I'm sending it here to get some discussion from other module authors/CPAN users.
I package Perl modules for Debian, so I use the CPAN Search Diff Tool a lot to figure out what has changed between releases. However, authors are (rightfully so) cleaning up their directories and removing old modules that aren't useful anymore. While that's great for the mirrors, it means I cannot use the CPAN Search Diff Tool to get diffs of packages. Another limitation I've come across is that the CPAN Search Diff tool sometimes aborts for long diffs (probably to avoid a denial of service issue where someone runs really long diffs). I would ideally like to implement such a tool on the entire BACKPAN, so that we can get diffs of any packages. Since it would be presumably lower traffic than the normal CPAN Search tool, the CPU time limits could be bumped up and thus allow for the huge diffs I sometimes see. Does anyone know who currently maintains the CPAN Search stuff? (I heard Graham Barr but I'm not sure) Is it something we can implement on BACKPAN? Would these be good ideas? Cheers, Jonathan
