On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 1:05 PM, Karen Etheridge <[email protected]> wrote:
> I cannot think of any scenario where I would want to block a duplicate
> upload from the same user but allow a duplicate upload from another user...
> this sounds like a failure in application of the "be liberal in what you
> accept" rule.

You're missing what I'm saying.  PAUSE prevents a duplicate *path*.  It's WORM.

You can't upload 'authors/id/E/ET/ETHER/Foo-1.23.tar.gz' twice.  You
*can* upload 'authors/id/E/ET/ETHER/Foo-1.23-fixed.tar.gz' with the
exact same content -- perhaps just fixing your Changes file and having
every .pm file be the same.

Uploading to 'authors/id/A/AP/APEIRON/Foo-1.23.tar.gz' is just another
way of uploading to a different path.

> Is this genuinely considered a beneficial feature?  Is there any appetite
> for tightening up the checking?

No, because it would prevent the sort of updates I described.  The
rule is that module versions must not decrease.  There is no rule that
requires that at least one version increase.

Another example: I take over comaint of Foo.  I want to update the Pod
to mention that and change the bugtracker.  Otherwise, the module is
exactly the same.  I can ship a new tarball with the same module
*code* and thus version.   That prevents end users who use
cpan-outdated from having to install my tarball just because I changed
that.

>> No, it's because metacpan is stupid.  See
>> http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.workers/2013/03/msg1047.html
>
> It looks as if metacpan is just following PAUSE's lead here.

No.  PAUSE does nothing to suggest that distribution names (or
name-version) are unique keys[1].  Metacpan, search.cpan, CPAN testers
(except Metabase) and RT do.

If your DBA came to you with a schema with a unique key for non-unique
data (and didn't bother to check or enforce uniqueness), wouldn't you
describe that as "stupid" or something similar?

"Hi, here's the customer table.  I've created an index on FIRST_NAME.
We can use it as a primary key for our URL schema and API.  Sometimes
it's not unique though.  Is that OK?  It probably doesn't happen very
often."

/me facepalm

David

[1] But we addressed this in the Lancaster Consensus and eventually
PAUSE will start treating distribution names as unique keys, with some
grandfathering of existing distributions.

--
David Golden <[email protected]>
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