Re: Trimming the CPAN - "Automatic Purging"

On Fri, 26 Mar 2010, Andy Lester wrote:

> Absolutely.  This factual info would ideally look like this:
>
> "Of the 17,000 distros on CPAN, there are 8,000 that have versions more than a year older than the most recent one.  If those distros with versions more than a year out of date were purged, the number of files would decrease from 200,000 to 120,000.  This would save 7GB out of the 12GB that a full CPAN mirror takes now.  Removing that 7GB would mean Benefit X to mirror owners."
>
> Without that, how can module authors be bothered to care?

If you don't mind me interjecting, I still can't be bothered to care.  We
have basically a 12GB data set, and we're worried about that?  I see that a
small barrier to bringing on new mirrors on constrained pipes, but
ultimately that's not that big a deal.  Hell, there's single versions of
some Linux distros that are bigger than that.

End sum:  I personally don't think this is the most pressing issue facing
CPAN.  Just issue a best practices guide to all the module authors (or
include it as on-line documentation in PAUSE) and be done with it.

 	--Arthur Corliss
 	  Live Free or Die