Re: Trimming the CPAN - "Automatic Purging"

Hi Elaine,

Elaine Ashton wrote:
> On Mar 28, 2010, at 12:48 PM, Randy Kobes wrote:
> Jarkko and I were talking about it this morning - as he's not in
> favour of pruning - while trying to think of a way around the size
> problem and he reminded me of the idea that, if I recall correctly
> was Adreas' suggestion a while back, there be an A, B and C 'PAN' of
> sorts where you could pull varying degrees of content - sort of
> CPAN:Mini writ large. I don't think that idea ever got any traction
> because it wouldn't really solve some of the issues for the major
> upstream mirrors and the mechanics of deciding where to draw the
> lines between them. I still think it's a good idea though.

This sounds a bit like the CPAN -> backpan scheme but with some 
additional levels?

> I do very much like Tim's proposal for giving old modules a push to
> BackPAN since, with proper communication of the changes to the
> authors along with a way to mark exceptions, this would rid CPAN of a
> lot of cruft that should be on BackPan anyway.

I'm not even going to throw in my considerable weight on this whole 
debate of pruning*. But if backpan became the "official" way to access 
old versions starting from yesterday's, wouldn't that mean:

a) That the toolchain would have to be adapted to a tiered 
infrastructure (think of the indexes...)
and more importantly:
b) The backpan would have to be mirrored all over the place as well, 
thus pushing the problem to the next level?

Best regards,
Steffen

* If you must know, I don't like the means but sympathize with the goals.

PS: This isn't targeted at Elaine specifically, but can everybody please 
take a step back and relax? Please be civil.