About the Various PANs

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When it comes to CPAN, Perl has a lot of related acronyms, many of which can be hard to understand. Let’s take a moment to discuss some of them now. This discussion will focus mostly on the PANs. Let’s start with the most popular PAN in Perl:

CPAN

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The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. CPAN is a repository (or collection) of files which various authors have made available. There is one canonical CPAN repository and all other CPANs act as mirrors of either the canonical CPAN or of an additional mirror. This means that CPAN is distributed geographically. When you install from CPAN, you are, in many cases, actually installing from one of the CPAN mirrors. Choosing one which is geographically closer to you may result in faster download speeds, however this is not always necessary. For instance, if you choose cpan.metacpan.org as your mirror, Fastly will handle figuring out the fastest way to get the file to you.

PAUSE

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PAUSE is the “Perl Author Upload SErver”. This isn’t strictly one of the PANs, but it does belong in a discussion of the various moving parts associated with CPAN. PAUSE is the administrative layer which exists over CPAN. PAUSE controls the processes of assigning author names to users, accepting CPAN uploads and deciding (via 02packages.txt) which files are authorized (ie official) and which are not.

See this discussion of the PAUSE permissions system for more information on how PAUSE regulates uploads. (Note that the m permissions as referenced in this article no longer exists on PAUSE. Any m permissions have now been replaced by f.)

See also this post on viewing module permissions on MetaCPAN.

Perl6 on PAUSE

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PAUSE is also being used for Perl 6 distributions. And when you do zef install P5localtime, it will actually download that Perl 6 distribution from the nearest CPAN mirror.

Thanks to liztormato for this tip.

PrePAN

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If you’re thinking of releasing a new module to CPAN, but you’d like some feedback first, you can post your ideas on prepan.org

Unfortunately the PrePAN domain name has expired and the site has disappeared along with it.

module-authors

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You can have conversations regarding module naming, ideas for modules and more via email. Join the very friendly and helpful the module-authors mailing list.

MetaCPAN

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MetaCPAN is a layer on top of CPAN. Initially its sole purpose was to provide a web API which would parse CPAN module metadata and serve up information about the various modules. Hence the meta in MetaCPAN. The MetaCPAN API is the core of MetaCPAN‘s functionality.

Following the publishing of the API, a web front end was created. This search engine, now known simply as metacpan.org, relies exclusively on the MetaCPAN API to serve up its results. So, while most people may think of the search site as MetaCPAN itself, it’s really just one part of the project.

BackPAN

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BackPAN is an aggregation of what currently is and what at one point was on CPAN. For various reasons, modules can be deleted from CPAN before they have outlived their usefulness to the general public. If you’re looking for a module which can no longer be found on CPAN, you can try looking on a BackPAN. There are various BackPANs and, unlike CPAN itself, there is no one canonical BackPAN. This leads to a confusing situation where not every BackPAN may have exactly the same files, so this bears keeping in mind.

If you use backpan.metacpan.org or cpan.metacpan.org as the mirror which your CPAN install from, you are actually using a BackPAN, so in general you should be able to find what you need there. backpan.metacpan.org is an alias to cpan.metacpan.org, so just use whichever name you prefer.

MiniCPAN

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Sometimes you want a copy of CPAN for when you’re on the go, or just not able to get fast Internet access or for various other reasons. For such occasions, you can create a MiniCPAN, which is essentially a copy of all of the latest modules on CPAN. Since the older versions of modules are not included in a fresh MiniCPAN, it can be much more compact than a full CPAN mirror. I use a MiniCPAN when I’m in airplane mode – literally when I’m on an airplane – because there are often times when I’m working on something while in the air and I need to install a Perl module right now! See CPAN::Mini for more information.

DarkPAN

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Many of us have heard of the DarkPAN, but nailing down exactly what it is can be difficult, so I asked on Twitter. Based on my non-scientific poll, most people felt that DarkPAN was a blanket term for Perl code which does not exist in the CPAN. A smaller group of people thought of the DarkPAN as a MiniCPAN which contains Perl code not in the CPAN.

To quote TUX, a DarkPAN is:

the modules and scripts used in the wild (including non-OpenSourced company stuff) that is not publicly available (through CPAN). It is the part of perl that we cannot index, cannot analyze and cannot test when we upgrade perl.

GrayPAN

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Along with my Twitter poll, I also solicited thoughts on Reddit, which brought up the GrayPAN. For this part, I’m just going to quote KENTNL who says a GrayPAN

is publicly accessible, but published outside the cpan infrastructure, resulting in a codebase that is factually public, but functionally non existent from the perspective of CPAN, as things can’t really depend on it, and subsequently doesn’t get subjected to multi Arch testing with every release, and critical breakage is likely to go unnoticed until too late.

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For example: GNU Autotools/Autoconf uses Perl substantially, and is widely used in OpenSource, but due to not being on CPAN, it doesn’t attract being tested as routine against developmental versions of Perl.

This means that when Perl makes a change that breaks Auto*, it won’t be until Perl ships ( or is nearing shipping ) that people will know Autoconf is broken, which will mean there’s little to no scope for avoiding breaking it.

Greypan software is extra useful here, for another reason: It demonstrates that the argument about “stuff on darkpan could break”, is not merely a strawman, but a reality.

NB: Autotools being broken by perl changes actually happened, and late-cycle changes had to be made to Perl to avoid breakage, the “oh, consumers can fix their code” argument just isn’t helpful when the consumer is both so widespread, and important, and yet, potentially have a stagnant release process.

Hence, it’s a darkpan that doesn’t immediately appear “dark”, but functions with most of the downsides of a darkpan

I think that’s a better summary than I could provide.

The Lower Case PANs

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After much discussion about CPAN and friends. What about cpan, cpanp, cpanm and even cpm? These all have one thing in common. They are utilities for installing modules from CPAN.

cpan

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Lower case cpan is the name of (probably) the oldest CPAN installer client which is still in use. Read the docs.

cpanp

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cpanp is an iteration on the functionality which was brought to us by the cpan client. It was initially easier to set up than cpan and had more options.

TUX says:

cpanp is the user interface (CLI) to CPANPLUS, a module that once tried to extend and generalize cpan/CPAN but is now obsolete and removed from CORE.

Read the docs.

cpanm

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cpanm is the cpanminus command line CPAN installer. The name is a play on CPANPLUS. Written by MIYAGAWA, this command line interface did away with much of the configuration involved in using both cpan and cpanp. It offered a faster and friendlier way for people to get up and running when they wanted to install CPAN modules. Read the docs.

cpm

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cpm is an even faster version of cpanm. It has more dependencies, but it can install modules in parallel, making it potentially much faster at installation than any of the other CPAN installers. Read the docs.

In Conclusion

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If you found any of this confusing, you are not alone. To truly understand all of these tools (and even their names) it helps to understand the historical context in which they came to exist. There’s a lot of developer and community effort which has gone into the development of these tools and resources. I’m very grateful for it as these tools save me countless hours of my own time every week. Hopefully this little walk down CPAN‘s memory lane has been helpful to you. In future, if a friend or colleague is confused as to the meaning of any of these terms, you’ll be well placed to bore them to tears with the details.

If you’d like to discuss this post, /r/perl might be a good place for that.