25 Years of Perl

[Graham Barr]

On Nov 24, 2012, at 22:43 , David H. Adler <dha at panix.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 12:25:33PM +0000, Dave Cross wrote:
>> Quoting Guinevere Nell <guinevere.nell at gmail.com>:
>> 
>>> On that subject, I recall that search.cpan.org sucked at the start and I'm
>>> not sure who fixed it (the search) and who maintained CPAN (and it's
>>> accumulating wonderful -- and sometimes silly -- modules) but yeah it's the
>>> heart of most development ...
>> 
>> That's a good point. I know when CPAN started (1995) but I don't
>> know when search.cpan.org launched. Can anyone help there?
> 
> It was originally Graham's project, so he'd probably be the one to ask.

search.cpan.org started  in 1998 about the same time as cpan testers

search.cpan.org was originally hosted on a Sun Solaris box at Washington University in St. Louis (wustl.edu) by Elaine Ashton

due to storage constraints the original site did not keep an unpacked version of CPAN as it does now. It unpacked the tarball to index the cleaned up. During a request for a pod document it would extract the pod from the tarball and cache the generated html, purging the cache as space was needed.

I think it was around 2001 that we started keeping CPAN in an unpacked form.

In 2003 there was an auction at OSCONN in Portland, won by London PM, which resulted in the colors of search being changed to orange for a while. We did a fund raising campaign to expedite the return to its original color which was quite controversial.

Also, cpantesters was originally a static site. I had a script which processed emails sent to a mailing list which generated the files and uploaded them to my isp. I was on a dialup machine at home at the time so this script was run once a day when I got home from work. It later moved to also be hosted at wustl.edu and be more dynamic.

Graham.