CPAN

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CPAN History

The idea for CPAN, a single comprehensive archive of all things Perl, was first 

introduced in 1993 by Jared Rhine on the perl packrats mailing list.

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 The concept 

derived from the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN). At this point a 

number of large Perl archives were maintained on various FTP sites around the 

world. It was widely agreed that there would be many advantages to collecting all 

the available Perl materials in one hierarchy; however, the discussion died with 

out producing a working version.

In early 1995 Jarkko Hietaniemi resurrected the idea and began the monumental 

task of gathering and organizing the entire output of the Perl community into a 

single tree. Six months later he produced a working  private showing.  This 

CPAN was essentially a sorted, classified version of the contents of every Perl 

archive on the Internet.

However, a critical piece was missing a way for Perl authors to upload their 

work and have it automatically included in CPAN. Andreas Koenig came to the 

rescue by creating the Perl Author Upload SErver (PAUSE). PAUSE automatically 

builds the authors and modules by directories that form the bulk of content on 

CPAN (86.5 percent at present).

With PAUSE in place, CPAN was nearly complete. After two months of testing and 

fixing with the help the perl packrats, Jarkko released CPAN to the world as the 

Self Appointed Master Librarian. The master server was set up at FUNet, where 

Jarkko worked as a systems administrator, which is where it remains today. From 

then on CPAN played a central role in the growth of the Perl community.

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Network Topology

CPAN is composed of servers spread across the globe (over 200 as I write). Every 

server provides access to the same data. Figure 1 1 shows a map of CPAN servers. 

You can explore the CPAN network interactively at http://mirror.cpan.org.

3. he perl packrats list, active from 1993 to 1996, was formed to discuss archiving Perl. Mailing 

list archives can be found at http://history.perl.org/packratsarch/.

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