On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 11:12:32AM +0000, Tim Bunce wrote: > Currently on PAUSE you have to explicitly delete old uploads.
Which often is a good thing. While BACKPAN exists, it isn't somewhere that many go to look for old distributions. For me and probably others, BACKPAN only distributions are ones that have been specifically marked by the maintainers as obsolete, badly broken or similar. Automatic deletes from CPAN would change that. There are many distributions on CPAN that older versions work on a particular perl/os, but more recent ones don't. Latest isn't necessarily the greatest. If you are going to perform this then it should really feed off the CPAN Testers to know if a specific release has been marked as being the latest working release for a particular perl/os. I would also suggest extending the timeframe considerably to perhaps 3 or maybe 5 years. Lastly I would also personnally be annoyed if only the latest versions were available, as I often make great use of the diff tool on search.cpan.org. Having only the latest version renders that great tool redundant :( > Files selected in this way would be scheduled to be deleted in a month > and an email would be sent to the authors, just as if they'd selected > the files for deletion via PAUSE. There are already many authors who have non-responding email addresses (I will get around to publicising that list at some point), so some will likely disappear down a blackhole. What if you're about to delete a set of distributions that should really be kept available? No one would be listening to know that it should still be kept. I would prefer a suggestion email to authors to delete, rather than an email telling them that their distributions will be deleted unless they do something. Cheers, Barbie. -- Birmingham Perl Mongers <http://birmingham.pm.org> Memoirs Of A Roadie <http://barbie.missbarbell.co.uk> CPAN Testers Blog <http://blog.cpantesters.org> YAPC Conference Surveys <http://yapc-surveys.org>
