It's a new year, so it's time to reduce the size of CPAN.
A long time ago, I was really interested in measuring the growth of CPAN, and comparing that to the size of MINICPAN, which I called the Schwartz Factor.
I'm interested again because CPAN just filled up an old laptop disk and my FreeBSD machine got really concerned about where it would put files. CPAN is over 3 gigs. Yowsers! We can get under 3 if people can delete about 150 Mb of old versions.
Some of that size, however, is cruft and old versions of modules. Delete those older files! You'll still find them on BackPAN, so you don't need to keep them in CPAN. :)
Re:Effect of previous call to increase your Schwar
brian_d_foy on 2006-01-24T05:11:40
I forget the numbers, but as I recall we shaved a couple of percent off the size. No matter how we did then, maybe we can do better this time.:)
Re:Is there any way to detect the worse offenders?
brian_d_foy on 2006-01-24T06:25:08
Sure, we could just go through the author directories and count up the byte size of all of the old distros. Maybe I'll hack up that script; I need something for next month's The Perl Journal.:)
I'm not about shaming people though, and some people might have good reason to keep old versions around.
Re:Is there any way to detect the worse offenders?
Alias on 2006-01-24T07:32:24
Well, it's never _about_ shaming people.
It's about providing more information for people. When a new batch of information becomes available (like the CPANTs stuff) there will be a number of people that totally won't have known they were doing the wrong thing, and will quite quickly move to fix it.
And those that don't care will never see.
Just don't make a competition out of it.:)
If you were to list people based on "inverted Schwatz factor" then you could just list it for the good people as "3 or less", to avoid people religiously culling modules so hard that we don't even have one previous version available.
Couldn't some kind of auto-archiving take place, where things get moved to BackPAN?
Re:Keep at least one old version, please!
jand on 2006-01-24T22:27:50
I totally agree with this! I would even argue that only releases over a year old should be deleted. Having the last couple of versions available for forensic investigations using the search.cpan.org diff tool is very valuable.Disk space is cheap; 3GB is less than a single DVD.
:)
