Our esteemed pumpking and chief CPAN librarian, Jarkko Hietaniemi, writes:
If you see "www.perl.com/CPAN-local" links somewhere, please tell the maintainer of that document to fix that to "www.cpan.org". For example, "http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/ports/" should be "http://www.cpan.org/ports/". This unfortunate bug spread all around the world for quite some time because of perl.com's slightly broken redirect feature. www.perl.com never was intended to be the definitive CPAN site. www.cpan.org is a load-balancing cluster of more than 200 hosts around the globe, www.perl.com/CPAN is just one mirror of it. Spread the word.
Re:Rewrite?
pudge on 2001-12-20T20:11:54
They can hire you to do it!Re:Rewrite?
jhi on 2001-12-20T21:19:14
Maybe I was not clear enough.
The problem is not www.perl.com/CPAN-local not working (it does).
The problem is people thinking www.perl.com/CPAN-local is the canonical CPAN base URL (it isn't).
Background: there used to be a "multiplexor" in perl.com, that from the reverse-DNS of your IP redirected you to a (hopefully) closer site (since the pipe to perl.com was tiny). Then, at some point in time, the multiplexor broke so that it *ALWAYS* directed people to perl.com, and more precisely, to "www.perl.com/CPAN-local". Now, thanks to the books of certain Perl book publisher, people thought that (a) www.perl.com is the right place to go to for CPAN (b) when they did go there, the broken multiplexor threw them to "CPAN-local". This resulting unfortunate URL then got enshrined in countless documents, and I think, unfortunately, in further books.
The perl.com multiplexor has since then been fixed (I think), but the bad seed is out there.Re:Rewrite?
schuyler on 2001-12-20T21:30:52
Well, if you change your mind:-) ... we can always take jjohn's suggestion, and put our CPAN archive elsewhere... Re:Rewrite?
hfb on 2001-12-20T21:52:29
There's no need to move it anywhere and, in every manuscript I've gotten from ORA and others I always circle the CPAN-local in red and put the correct URL in there instead. We put the 'FUNET' logo on the bottom of the front page to remind people that it is FUNET supplying the power,pipe,ping and disks for CPAN and to give them a few warm fuzzies.
As a male of the species who put their names on the tiniest of patches to Perl you might understand the wish to firmly form an identity for CPAN outside the realm of ORA.
:) Re:Rewrite?
gnat on 2001-12-21T20:11:12
I just sent mail to Linda, the Perl editor at O'Reilly, telling her about the move away from perl.com and to cpan.org. Now she knows it, it'll be right in future books.--Nat
Google Search
unobserved on 2001-12-21T12:47:06
A search on google for
link:http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/
Turned up 4 pages of results. Anyone want to undertake emailing the web masters of all linking sites? Got a standard mail to send out to those people?Re:Google Search
jdavidb on 2001-12-21T13:49:25
If only we could fix the whole 20-year archive of groups.google.com.
Re:Google Search
unobserved on 2001-12-21T15:09:06
Maybe if we ask google real nice, and send them some chocolate they'll do a massive search and replace for us.Re:Google Search
jdavidb on 2001-12-24T17:57:31
Wouldn't it be cool if there was a great software tool or programming language they could use for that? Hmmm... What a good idea!
Altavista Re:Google Search
n1vux on 2001-12-21T17:38:37
That old standby Altavista finds 8,348 . A little too many to mail to except as robo-spam... It's a bit much to hope that all but 4 of those were fixed since Altavista's last scan. (Google found 39 for me. Google is not deterministic!)
-- Bill wdr@world.std.com n1vux@most.everywhereRe:Altavista Re:Google Search
vsergu on 2001-12-21T21:57:55
Google is not deterministic!
Not by your evidence: 39 results == 4 pages of results.
