CPAN6 Under Construction

By Mark Overmeer (‎markov‎) from Arnhem.pm, Amsterdam.pm
Date: Friday, 15 August 2008 13:30
Duration: 30 minutes
Language:
Tags: cpan distribution modules xml

You can find more information on the speaker's site:

Talk: http://cpan6.org/papers/2008yapceu/

Probably most people pick Perl to program just because of this huge free software archive CPAN. CPAN makes that complex tasks are simple in Perl.

In the previous three years, a lot of effort was put in rethinking CPAN. How can we support the software modules produced for Perl6 and other Parrot derivates with an archive as useful as our beloved CPAN? Which new technologies are useful to incorporate in our infrastructure? After a while, it became clear to me that such generalized archive implementation could have a much wider application.

A few large core components of the CPAN6 infrastructure are implemented as general purpose modules. The user interface is the main remaining hurdle. Challenges in the implementation (using XML) will be shared, and some examples of future developments shown.

Some script can convert any Perl5 module into CPAN6. This way, the experimental CPAN6 implementation has access to a sufficiently large and realistic data-set.