15 years ago Jarkko Hietaniemi started CPAN; now arguably the most important feature of Perl. For all that time the canonical CPAN has been hosted at FUnet, with (now more than 600) mirrors around the world. Having made much of my living using Perl I'm incredibly grateful to Jarkko and FUnet for having built and maintained this incredible resource for such a long time.
A few months ago Jarkko started passing the baton for looking after CPAN on to others in the community and as part of that we at perl.org are taking over the task of being the "master mirror" for CPAN. Currently almost 500 of the CPAN mirrors are mirroring straight from FUnet which is an incredible resource drain for the master mirror.
The new system will be using the rrr tool for rapid mirroring to a set of "tier 1" mirrors so we more easily can scale to support anyone who wants to mirror CPAN. File::Rsync::Mirror::Recent is already in use by some of the mirrors to get "instant" updates from PAUSE. Andreas König (the inventor and long time maintainer of PAUSE) is working on some improvements to make it work better for cpan.org in general.
We're also working on getting things in place so the static pages on cpan.org more easily can be maintained and updated by the community.
If you are interested in helping with testing the mirroring process or anything else, please subscribe to the cpan-workers mailing list.
- Ask
I for one welcome our new CPAN overlords.
Posted by: Schwern | Sunday, February 20, 2011 at 17:09
Congrats.
BTW Maybe you could add the feed of log.perl.org to Ironman as well. There is a link on the top of their page to submit it.
Posted by: Szabgab | Sunday, February 20, 2011 at 23:31