all 11 comments

[–]doomvox 6 points7 points  (0 children)

"Dark PAN" is a name that used to be used for any proprietary code-base that was set-up to use the CPAN tool-chain. It behaves like CPAN, but it's not generally accessible.

[–]kentnl 2 points3 points  (5 children)

There's also "greypan", which 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 b subjected to multi Arch testing with every release, and critical breakage is likely to go unnoticed until too late.

Hence, it's a darkpan that doesn't immediately appear "dark", but functions with most of the downsides of a darkpan

[–]jplindstrom 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Do you mean like stuff on GitHub?

[–]kentnl 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Github, sure, but also source forge, Gnu.org, etc.

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.

[–]ThirdEncounter 0 points1 point  (2 children)

What stuff on github?

[–]jplindstrom 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I meant mostly modules that are hosted on GitHub, but not published on CPAN.

[–]ThirdEncounter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In that case, yes. Modules published on github.

[–]crashorbit 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Darkpan is the straw man that shows up whenever someone wants to remove support for old versions of their CPAN modules.

[–]gah_fine 1 point2 points  (0 children)

FWIW, I'd say it'd have to be a mini CPAN. To me half the point is being able to install in-house code using cpanm, carton, and the like.

[–]Grinnz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Apologies in advance but this is all the title makes me think of...


[–]perlancar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the XPAN (where X != "C") are usually misnomers because they refer to a single directory or site, whereas CPAN is a network.