CPAN6

collecting collections of digital information

People are designed to collect things, whether it is food, postal stamps, or digital information. On our hard-drives, we collect software, photos, development sources, documents, music, e-mail, and much more. The typical application sees this `collecting' as secundary problem to their main task, offering little help in administering the data produced with it. CPAN6 focusses purely on this aspect, and can therefore improve the way people work in general.

Brief history

The Perl community has a very succesfull module archive, named CPAN. In just over 11 years, it has collected more than 11,000 different open source modules, contributed by thousands of authors.

Many other programming language communities have tried to create their own version of CPAN, but none was so successful yet. One of the disadvantages of CPAN is that it is very much entangled with Perl5, so it cannot be used to implement other archives. And this starts to bite the Perl community itself as well: with the upcoming release of Perl6 (with Parrot as large product aside), the old infrastructure needs a major overhaul.

In the process of abstracting the archive's functionality --combining the features of CPAN with modern needs like authentication-- it was discovered that the resulting design could benefit close to all applications: every time someone collects any form of digital information. Even, to organize ones home directory. Now, the target for CPAN6 has become to be included as Open/Save option in any application.