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Back-compatibility is compulsory (Score:1)
CPAN is so central to the success of Perl 5 that even Perl 6 won't break back-compatibility.
So let's forget about that right now.
Large changes are also very tricky.
There's some small things we can do, in fact we've been experimenting with them in the JSAN implementation.
Things like:
- Multiple Indexes
- Mirror Validation and HTTP-centric rather than FTP-centric transport
There's also plans from the Win32 side of things like a GUI failure-reporting CPAN client.
But apart from things currently being brokenish (which we can blame more on CPANPLUS, Module::Build and Module::Install), there's not a whole lot wrong with CPAN as things stand.
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Re:Back-compatibility is compulsory (Score:1)
Well, the incompatible syntax of Perl 6 will be doing that anyway. The fact is, there will eventually be code on the CPAN that perl 5 cannot run.* If we do it very carefully, we can use this opportunity to do some really nice things for those Perl 6 modules.
Wouldn't it be nice to have an infrastructure where we could have all those with