Just to summarize (and this is going to be the last mail I send in this thread):
Old releases (more than a few releases back) are virtually useless. Just how useless is up for debate, but BACKPAN is there. We've always encouraged CPAN authors to purge old releases as appropriate. Tim noticed (I'm guessing) that while many authors do this; some just don't at all. He suggests that we could make the computers help them remember or do it, one way or another. Everyone who doesn't run mirrors says "oh, who cares - it doesn't bother me". Some of us who does run mirrors say "actually, that sort of thing is important and an actual issue.". Others reply "then you're doing it wrong". But nobody came with something reality based that'd be "right". The main point here is that we can't use 20 inodes per distribution. It's Just Nuts. Sure, it's only something like 400k files/inodes now - but at the rate it's going it'll be a lot more soon enough. HOWEVER: Right now more of those are wasted on other things (.readme files, symlinks, ...) -- some of which have solutions in progress already. I don't think anyone is arguing that we NEED to delete the old distributions; only that they do indeed have a cost to keep around in the main CPAN. - ask
