On Tue, 24 May 2011, David Golden wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 4:32 PM, Leon Timmermans <faw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 10:17 PM, David Golden <xda...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Then, given one of those three ordered list of tarballs that satisfy
> >> all prereqs, it should be possibly to repeatably deploy an application
> >> with a known set of module versions, even as the "latest" on CPAN
> >> evolves.
> >
> > That could get a bit troublesome with the current best practice to
> > delete older versions of module from CPAN.
And a somewhat unfortunate practice, as it makes it hard to create diffs
between arbitrary module versions. And with the new fast-mirror mechanism,
I'm not sure that the aggressive pruning of CPAN should still be considered
a "best" practice, as it makes the web-based diff on search.cpan.org
pretty useless. For example when trying to understand this Locale-Codes
changelog entry:
| 3.16 2011-03-01 sbeck
| * NEW CODE(s)
I would first try to look here:
http://search.cpan.org/tools/Locale-Codes-3.16
But it is not working because even the previous release has already been
deleted.
> http://backpan.perl.org/
>
> I don't remember when they started keeping the history -- I've seen
> stuff as far back as 1997.
Yes, backpan has the complete history with very few exceptions (I think
some website scraping modules were deleted from backpan when the website
owner threatened legal action).
AFAICT there is no good index for backpan though. I have to audit diffs
to older module versions quite often, so I have my own tools, and found
that even the links are not comprehensive; I have to crawl both
backpan/modules/by-module and backpan/modules/by-authors/id to make
sure I find *all* the different versions.
Cheers,
-Jan
