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Comment by jasonjayr | Hacker News Reader

As an active perl5 programmer, what do you mean by (1)?

To this day, I've seen package management systems for many languages, and none I've seen has been as good as CPAN in terms of

(1) Consistent place for distribution + documentation (cpan.org/metacpan.org)

(2) Automated testing on a wide variety of platform and configuration (cpantesters.org)

(3) CPAN has as standard for declaring dependencies in packages, but a newer "cpanfile" may be more akin go "modern" dependency management. Perl has also had a way of 'use Package $version' right in the source code for ages.

(4) the command "cpanm Package::Name" (or even the older "cpan Package::Name") almost always results in figuring out whatever distribution needs to be installed, even if the distribution is named differently from the package name.

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I don’t know where you’ve been looking, but none of that is particularly interesting or new at this point.

I worked with Perl daily and find CPAN even more of a wasteland than NPM. The average package there hasn’t been updated in a decade and has ancient dependencies to match; takes months / years for clients to be written for new tech.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not disputing that the existing collection of modules on CPAN is languishing, but specific point is that the infrastructure behind CPAN + module distribution is unparalleled by anything I've seen elsewhere.

What's wrong with a package not being updated for 10 years?

Languages like perl--like common lisp, and c--are Stable. They change, some, but you can count on old code working. If a 10-year-old package Works, what reason is there to update it? I wrote a c library which has seen no updates in about 2 years--because it doesn't need them. It already does everything I need it to do.

I'm not talking about the 'reached perfection' case. In ten years the language, standards and it's patterns, underlying libraries, hardware, performance, all change. There is also no value in having a working, stable implementation of say, md5 when the entire world has moved on.

Often I'll just not find the library I want since nobody using that tech is actually writing Perl. For example, complete lack of a working GraphQL package until late 2017.

CPAN search in particular is unbelievably bad. The first result for 'Postgres' is a package last updated in 1998 (not joking), try to find a usable driver here: https://metacpan.org/search?q=postgres. Even the widely used DBI package has last seen an update almost a year ago.

It is pretty unfortunate that so many people used "PostgreSQL" and "Postgres" in their module name and DBD::Pg didn't, so it gets ranked lower for those queries. But ranking is a hard problem when there is no curation. The MetaCPAN team does want to improve this if possible.

As for DBI, it's definitely in the "stable" category and isn't trying to keep up with anything; the DBD::Pg driver though was last updated this month.

I'm sorry your initial search for a term didn't immediately give you what you're looking for, but the database layer of Perl is very mature, and if you looked at the docs for DBI, you would see that it uses drivers in the DBD namespace, and if you search DBD, postgres is in the first few results, under DBD::Pg. Just like NPM, having a word in your module namespace or description is probably not always very well correlated to module quality or whether it's actually related to that term, so a bit of active research is best to determine what should be used. Then again, I'm not sure NPM is known for providing mobile namespaces that allow third party modules to interact well in a pluggable way, which is quite common on CPAN.

I would love to see a upgrade to cpan able to handle names converted to lowercase internally. To remind that you must write "use MymoDuleSQL" instead "use myModuLeSqL" can become pretty frustrating for my tired eyes.

This would be a pretty difficult change. Aside from backwards incompatibility, module names are both filesystem lookups and package stash lookups, and in most cases both of those are case sensitive, and it's entirely possible for valid programs to use two modules that only differ in case - at best I could see a warning that searches for a "did you mean?" but that sounds slow.

> Aside from backwards incompatibility

Isn't Perl 6 already backwards incompatible?

> module names are both filesystem lookups and package stash lookups

>> names converted to lowercase internally

Converting names to lowercase internally fixes this.

> it's entirely possible for valid programs to use two modules that only differ in case

Many people (myself included) would see this as a mis-feature not worth saving.

This thread was regarding Perl 5.

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