On 1/21/21 9:31 AM, Paul "LeoNerd" Evans wrote:
****

   rt.cpan.org, the bugtracker used by nearly 80% of all CPAN modules
   [1], is going to be shut down on 1st March this year [2]; 39 days
   from when I write this email.

****

I am rather concerned about this, as there doesn't appear to be any
sort of co-ordinated bailout plan or migration of the *huge amount* of
CPAN modules this is about to affect.

I am furthermore concerned at the total lack of discussion or response
that has so far been generated; aside from Karen Etheridge I haven't
seen any noise of upset being generated at all. Nor am I aware of any
sort of effort to handle what will become a huge outage of a major
component of the CPAN ecosystem.

I personally have 189 modules in need of migration - somehow. As yet
I have no clue what I am going to do about it. Existing bugs need to be
moved somewhere else (and I have no clue how I'm going to fix up URLs
that currently point to those, in code comments, documentation, blog
posts, ... anywhere else), and a new for users to report new bugs needs
to exist. Of special note are the numerous "in progress" tickets I have
across my distributions, containing ongoing discussions about design
issues and the like. To say that I am "concerned" is an understatement;
I am fairly close to panicing about this.

I am quite sure I am but the smallest tip of the iceberg here. Every
time I mention it on Freenode's #perl or irc.perl.org's #p5p there are
always new folks who were totally unaware of this fact. This is going
to hit lots of people in a very hard surprise.

I am therefore interested to know if anyone has any sort of thoughts or
plan on what to do about this; either

   a) Attempts to take over maintenance of the system as it stands, or

   b) Find an alternative location and implement some sort of
      mass-bailout in that direction.


To emphasise again: in 39 days time the bug tracker used by nearly 80%
of all of CPAN is going to be shut down and become unavailable for
either historic or newly-reported bugs. We *need* to find a solution in
that time. It would be great if we all went the same way, thus making
the lives of users (and metacpan.org) a lot simpler, rather than all
scattering in 50 different ways, which will cause a huge splintering of
what has been a very coherent service so far.


1: Add the "known to be RT" and "unknown" categories of
    https://cpan.rocks/; because metacpan.org defaults to RT in the
    latter case.

2: https://log.perl.org/2020/12/rtcpanorg-sunset.html


Thanks for more widely distributing this.

This is probably one of the worst things to happen to Perl since I've been using it.

I can handle a stagnant language.  I cannot handle the uncertainty of knowing whether a CPAN module has bugs, especially when that module may no longer be in active development, or CPAN is the only authoritative location for the source code. There are *many* CPAN modules for which CPAN is the only public place to find the source.

rt.cpan precedes the creation of public cloud based source repositories, and provides a vital service for the Perl community.  Cloud based repositories come and go.  Who here (other than myself) was forced to migrate from Bitbucket when they shut down their Mercurial service and 401'd all of the existing repositories?  They broke every single URL in my Perl ecosystem and in the wider Mercurial ecosystem.  What happens when GitHub or GitLab does the same?

I don't trust commercial services.  I do (did) trust Perl's.  I don't place any blame on the volunteers who ran rt.cpan.  I was under the impression that the TPF funded them, but I guess not.  I don't know who is in charge of this asylum anymore.

I'm more than frustrated by the response from on of the PSC on p5porters, which was

 This is infrastructure maintained by NOC volunteers. What would you suggest Perl 5 Porters do?

Is Perl so compartmentalized that those elected to lead the language forward have no insight into this?  Did anyone at the "higher levels" actually talk with the NOC volunteers to determine what was going on?  All I hear is "Abandon Ship!" and don't bother helping out those who have no place to go.

So. Not. Perl.

I'm more than willing to donate money towards retaining rt.cpan as an active site (I cannot provide time).  But without any indication of what state its in or how much time is required to do so, it's hard to move forward.

I would hope that at the very least TPF would step forward to fund a grant to someone to take over rt.cpan, but TPF does not strike me as proactive.

Diab

P.S.  Don't bother asking me why I think Perl should be different in this aspect than other ecosystems.  Would it be better if Perl sucked just as much as the others?  I don't think so.  Perl has had higher standards.  This is not a shining moment for Perl.

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