On 3/21/26 09:31, James E Keenan wrote:
Having a problem which first becomes apparent running the 'cpan' shell,
but then points toward the cpan.org infrastructure.
Yesterday I installed perl-5.43.9 on by two servers (Linux and FreeBSD).
Here I present data from FreeBSD:
```
[perlmonger: perl-5.43.9] $ ls -l bin/perl bin/cpan
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jkeenan jkeenan 8418 Mar 20 14:56 bin/cpan
-rwxr-xr-x 2 jkeenan jkeenan 4080848 Mar 20 14:56 bin/perl
$ ./bin/perl -v | head -2 | tail -1
This is perl 5, version 43, subversion 9 (v5.43.9) built for amd64-
freebsd-thread-multi
$ ./bin/cpan -v
./bin/cpan script version 1.678, CPAN.pm version 2.38
```
I then installed Task::CPAN::Reporter against that perl (including a
trial release of Net-SSLeay-1.95_001) and then proceeded to generate
CPANtester reports for over 500 distros on each platform.
I subsequently received email indicating that some of the problems I
reported had already been fixed. I went back to those new perl
installations and tried to use the `cpan` shell to install the updated
distros.
```
$ cd $TESTINGDIR/perl-5.43.9
$ ./bin/cpan
cpan[1]> reload index
Reading '/home/jkeenan/.cpan/Metadata'
Database was generated on Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:41:01 GMT
Fetching with HTTP::Tiny:
https://cpan.org/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
Reading '/home/jkeenan/.cpan/sources/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz'
DONE
Fetching with HTTP::Tiny:
https://cpan.org/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz
Reading '/home/jkeenan/.cpan/sources/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz'
Database was generated on Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:41:01 GMT
Warning: This index file is 39 days old.
Please check the host you chose as your CPAN mirror for staleness.
I'll continue but problems seem likely to happen.
DONE
Fetching with HTTP::Tiny:
https://cpan.org/modules/03modlist.data.gz
Reading '/home/jkeenan/.cpan/sources/modules/03modlist.data.gz'
DONE
Writing /home/jkeenan/.cpan/Metadata
```
Note these two lines in the output above:
```
Database was generated on Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:41:01 GMT
Database was generated on Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:41:01 GMT
Warning: This index file is 39 days old.
Please check the host you chose as your CPAN mirror for staleness.
I'll continue but problems seem likely to happen.
```
I get a console beep when that line `Warning: Ths index file is 39 days
old.` appears.
Today, 21 Mar 2026, is 40 days after 09 Feb 2026. Now my *local* CPAN
metadata files are up-to-date:
```
$ ls -l ~/.cpan/Metadata ~/.cpan/sources/modules ~/.cpan/sources/authors
/
-rw-r--r-- 1 jkeenan jkeenan 44358810 Mar 21 13:05 /home/jkeenan/.cpan/
Metadata
/home/jkeenan/.cpan/sources/authors/:
total 273
-rw-r--r-- 1 jkeenan jkeenan 250949 Mar 21 13:05 01mailrc.txt.gz
drwxr-xr-x 28 jkeenan jkeenan 28 May 20 2021 id
/home/jkeenan/.cpan/sources/modules:
total 2549
-rw-r--r-- 1 jkeenan jkeenan 2592931 Mar 21 13:05
02packages.details.txt.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 jkeenan jkeenan 248 Mar 21 13:05 03modlist.data.gz
```
So what it appears is happening is that the files on cpan.org are out-
of-date:
```
https://cpan.org/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
https://cpan.org/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz
```
The problem appears to be that **inside** the local
`02packages.details.txt.gz` file, the `Last-Updated` entry is still 09
Feb 2026.
```
$ zcat ~/.cpan/sources/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz | head
File: 02packages.details.txt
URL: http://www.cpan.org/modules/02packages.details.txt
Description: Package names found in directory $CPAN/authors/id/
Columns: package name, version, path
Intended-For: Automated fetch routines, namespace documentation.
Written-By: PAUSE version 1.005
Line-Count: 270470
Last-Updated: Mon, 09 Feb 2026 15:41:01 GMT
A1z::Html 0.04 C/CE/CEEJAY/A1z-Html-0.04.tar.gz
```
So every time I say `reload index` inside the `cpan` shell, I'm getting
the same 40-day-old data every time. I note, for instance, that in
02packages I don't see the latest version of a CPAN distro which I
uploaded on 03 March.
```
$ zgrep -n 'Business::Tax::US' ~/.cpan/sources/modules/02packages.detail
s.txt.gz
30869:Business::Tax::US::Form_1040::Worksheets 0.07 J/JK/JKEENAN/
Business-Tax-US-Form_1040-Worksheets-0.07.tar.gz
```
... whereas metacpan.org correctly has version 0.08 uploaded on March 3.
```
https://metacpan.org/pod/Business::Tax::US::Form_1040::Worksheets
```
Where should this be further reported?
After many hours of head-banging-on-wall, I got the 'cpan' shell on one
of my two servers to DWIM -- though I don't know why it achieved the
result I wanted.
I had to compare the ~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm file on my laptop -- which
was already DWIMming -- with that on my Linux server. I observed
differences in 2 of the key-value pairs:
KVP Laptop (Ubuntu 24.04
