For many years now, http://search.cpan.org has been my go-to link for finding CPAN distributions, and has been the URL we've listed on our web sites directing users to Perl software downloads.
Sadly the site has become very unreliable in the last few months, and there does not appear to be a solution in the works. So, I've decided to gradually migrate to using https:://metacpan.org as our default web site for finding and pointing at CPAN distributions. This will involve making changes on web pages and in documentation, and it will take a while to do But, it seems important since the impression can be created by the search site that "CPAN is down". It's not. CPAN is alive and well, it's just that one particular navigator is not working too well. I hope to make these changes on the main package pages fairly soon, but in the event you run into a 503 or 504 error when accessing the search site, please realize there are other ways, and that CPAN is just fine. Here's some additional commentary and info about this issue https://github.com/perlorg/perlweb/issues/115 http://perlhacks.com/2013/01/give-me-metacpan/ http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=1093542 http://grokbase.com/t/perl/beginners/145nsxqz2w/cpan-unavailable When we started using the search site in about 2002 it was pretty great. The good news is that https://metacpan.org is even better, so this is a positive change. Thanks, Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse
