With yesterdays release of Perl 5.10.1, I'm happy to report that the work on configure_requires is finally (FINALLY) officially "done".
It's not that the actual work wasn't finished.
But because it was a completely back-compatible change for all CPAN users that will require significant education, I felt that if we were going to ask the entire Perl userbase to upgrade their CPAN clients, it was important that we only asked them to do so once.
And for new users, we needed them to have support for it out the box.
Now that it is fully completed and in the core release of the current production-recommended Perl, we've finally reached the point where we can say to everyone:
"We've implemented a one-time backwards incompatible change to the CPAN. You will need to upgrade your CPAN.pm or CPANPLUS, but just once and after that it will self-upgrade"
So feel free to spread the world to mongers and lists and distros and anywhere else that might need to know. Everyone is going to need to do a one-time upgrade to get the "5.10.1 auto-upgrading toolchain".
The next round of updates to the CPAN will be far less trouble, and should be largely transparent. Two changes are confirmed and in development currently.
1. We are implementing the new "MYMETA" file to unify the communication mechanism between EU:MM/M:B/M:I and the parent CPAN client.
2. The META.yml will be transitioned from YAML to JSON (as will the new MYMETA.yml/json) to simplify the code needed to support them.
