Re: Need suggestions for terminology

On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 10:47 AM, David Cantrell <[email protected]> wrote:
> There's at least one other significant difference: CPAN has an
> up-to-date index.  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