Re: MetaCPAN vs. uscan

Hi,

I think I can work on the uscan option. Just tell me where to find the example.

Nb: I'll be in Brest on Tuesday 

Best regards, 
Xavier


Le 10 juillet 2025 23:21:43 GMT+02:00, gregor herrmann <[email protected]> a écrit :
>Since a couple of days, MetaCPAN changed their ways of fighting AI scrapers, according to [0] with some service called "signalsciences". Which, according to [1] works fine, except that it means that all requests from the commandline / programmatically / with a non-javascript-capable browser don't work anymore. [2] This includes uscan(1). [3]
>
>So this means that we won't do any updates of Debian packages representing CPAN distributions anymore.
>
>As for potential fixes/workarounds:
>- Setting a different User-Agent doesn't change anything.
>- Bas found a way to change debian/watch to use the MetaCPAN API, cf.   [4]. In my POV, that's both technically brilliant and aesthetically   difficult :)
>  In general I think that updating ~5000  d/watch files (and some   tools) is not an attractive option …
>- Hacking uscan to mangle metacpan.org URLs (or to work around the   javascript requirement from signalsciences in general) might be   doable but that would have to go into stable and whatever as well.
>- Using a redirector for uscan might work but probably also needs   updating all d/watch files.
>
>I guess talking to the MetaCPAN folks would be a reasonable next step. Is there anybody, maybe wih connections to them, willing to do this? I admit that I don't have the energy to put another task on my TODO list.
>
>Or maybe someone else has other ideas …
>
>Cheers,
>gregor
>
>
>[0] https://github.com/metacpan/metacpan-web/commit/212a28303f761c181a4fcd94d8b17e70650ac1c2 [1] https://blogs.perl.org/users/dean/2025/07/metacpan-running-really-well-thanks.html
>[2] try
>    wget -O- https://metacpan.org/release/ack
>    curl https://metacpan.org/release/ack
>    GET https://metacpan.org/release/ack
>[3] uscan --report -vvv
>    in a soure package directory
>[4] https://salsa.debian.org/perl-team/modules/packages/libpdl-vectorvalued-perl/-/commit/fc92473
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