It's with sad hearts that we are announcing that search.cpan.org will be retired on the 25th of June 2018.
Graham Barr originally wrote the site nearly 20 years ago -- it first went live in early 1999 -- and it quickly became an invaluable resource for Perl developers around the world.
The ability to search CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) and read Perl module documentation online helped spark many developers interest in Perl and helped to build the Perl community.
The site was originally hosted by Washington University in St. Louis on a single Solaris box. For his work on search.cpan.org, Graham won a White Camel award in 2002.
The site was later moved to the Perl NOC. US mirrors were hosted by YellowBot and Phyber and a European mirror has been hosted by digital craftsmen for the last 10 years. These amazing people and companies helped make the site a success.
In recent years maintenance has become a burden. Most of the site is running 2005 era Perl code. Luckily, there is now a viable alternative: MetaCPAN.org. The MetaCPAN team has been getting ready for the transition and is nearly ready to take over.
Shortly, a link will be added to all pages on search.cpan.org to inform users of the upcoming change. After about a month, all traffic will be redirected to the equivalent MetaCPAN page.
We would like to thank all who have assisted with this project. An extra special thanks to Graham for his hard work and unwavering support of search.cpan.org for all these years. To search.cpan.org -- we will miss you.
Thanks to Graham for starting such a useful community resource and to everyone else who has been involved in running it over the years.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to recall a time before the existence of CPAN search - it's now such a vital part of the Perl ecosystem.
I hope there will be a redirect from search to metacpan. I still think of search as canonical.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Graham.
Seconded!
DeleteYeah, it's good that metacpan.org has features in place to provide replacements for all search.cpan.org URLs, like this post says.
DeleteIt still seems like a huge shame that use.perl.org disappeared without providing any kind of continuity for its links. I wonder what happened there!
I echo Dave Cross's gratitude to Graham Barr and the Perl NOC for search.cpan.org.
ReplyDeleteI am sad that it is going away. I've always preferred it to metacpan.org.
An important question: What provision will be made for other internet resources which use search.cpan.org as their canonical cpan-search tool?
I speak of FreeBSD ports in particular. Each FreeBSD port has a 'pkg-descr' file which, if it's a port of a CPAN distribution, has a line like this:
#####
WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/CPAN-Testers-Common-Client/
#####
There are thousands of such ports. What will the update plan for that be?
Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan
Yes. Hopefully the redirects will take those URLs and redirect them intelligently.
DeleteThat's a shame. I prefer the clean interface of search.cpan.org over the metacpan site.
ReplyDeleteWhere's the source code? May be kinda fun to play around with.
https://github.com/metacpan/metacpan-web for the interface, https://github.com/metacpan/metacpan-api for the search/index backend
DeleteIf you meant the source code of cpansearch, it has never been published.
Delete