Saturday, June 11, 2022

CPAN: ftp.cpan.org depreciation

As a followup to the CPAN Mirror List changes from last year, we're announcing that FTP service on ftp.cpan.org and ftp.perl.org is being deprecated. This means that any CPAN clients configured to use them will fail to fetch modules.

For the past several years, CPAN clients have defaulted to www.cpan.org to fetch modules, so this should only affect users using very old CPAN clients (usually associated with old versions of Perl) who did not explicitly set a mirror.

We're not setting a firm timeline on this depreciation, but there are only a small number of compatible FTP mirrors remaining, and the number is shrinking over time.  At some point, there will no longer be any remaining FTP mirrors, and the service will be terminated.  Because these mirrors are run by independent volunteers, we don't have a good way of measuring actual traffic.

If you think you might be using a CPAN client configured to use ftp.cpan.org or ftp.perl.org, please check, and reconfigure to use the globally available www.cpan.org instead.

If you're using CPAN.pm, you can configure www.cpan.org as the mirror with these commands:

o conf urllist https://www.cpan.org/ 

o conf commit

(If your perl doesn't have Net::SSLEay installed to support TLS, you can just use http://www.cpan.org/)