On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 10:47 AM, David Cantrell <da...@cantrell.org.uk> wrote: > There's at least one other significant difference: CPAN has an > up-to-date index. Â BackPAN doesn't.
Further to that point, I think the idea of "the index" should be separated from the idea of "the repository". The repository may contain an index, it may or may not be "up to date" -- which itself isn't a well defined concept given the lag between submission to PAUSE (and fast mirroring) and inclusion in the 02packages file. I plan to expand further on this idea of separation at the QA Hackathon in the spring (if I don't start working on it sooner). I'd like to get all CPAN clients able to use an index completely separate from a given repository, where the index could, for example, provide URLs to different repositories, such as internal or external, or CPAN and BackPAN, etc. Among other things, this would allow a project to freeze (and version control) a CPAN index and use it for repeatable deployment of a specific dependency chain. -- David
