Talks

CPAN6, CPAN for Perl6 - Sam Vilain & MarkOv
Thursday, The Onion Room, 1600, 90 mins

With Perl6 far underway, it is time to look at all kinds of tools which surround Perl5. Some of them will certainly need an overhaul to facilitate the new language's needs. Probably the most important reason for people to prefer Perl over other languages is CPAN. What are the needs for CPAN to support Perl6?

In their quest for the new requirements, Mark and Sam discoved the limitations of the CPAN system; battles over name-spaces, weak authentication, and Perl5 dependencies, to name just a few. So they started designing CPAN's follow-up.

CPAN6 is meant to preserve the best of CPAN: simple to contribute new software, simple to install modules. At the same time, with CPAN6 everyone can start their own CPAN-like archive, for any programming language. CPAN6 is a meta-archiving infrastructure, which has no equivalent yet. The current CPAN can smoothly fit in as a single instance of an archive, within the CPAN6 framework.