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Comment by portmanteaufu | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

> In recent years maintenance has become a burden. Most of the site is running 2005 era Perl code. Luckily, there is now a viable alternative: MetaCPAN.org. The MetaCPAN team has been getting ready for the transition and is nearly ready to take over. Shortly, a link will be added to all pages on search.cpan.org to inform users of the upcoming change. After about a month, all traffic will be redirected to the equivalent MetaCPAN page.

Existing search.cpan.org links will continue to work after the transition.

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>Existing search.cpan.org links will continue to work after the transition.

They should get a lot more credit for this. Linkrot sucks, and I'm sure the effort that was required to pull off maintaining those links is going to pay off greatly for many for years to come.

I concur. Rewrite rules for projects like this can get super crazy. Kudos to the devs/admins/community who put in the effort.

They actually have had the existing URLs working via `search.mcpan.org` for several years now, this is really just a matter of dropping the `m`.

I'm not very familiar with the Perl ecosystem, but that would be an entirely different domain; was the server behind it maintained by the the MetaCPAN people, or the cpan.org people?

It has been maintained by MetaCPAN people. Since this transition has been planned, extra work has been put it to make the redirects more comprehensive.

No link rot. Bravo for a display of true competence.

This is more surprising to see than it ought to be.

This is one of the main things Perl is about. The language and the community takes, in the broadest sense, operational stability very seriously. More serious than any other language community I'm aware of.

this is why you see people who know perl5 well get the shits with other language communities approach to backcompat and tooling. E.g recently I helped take a 20 year old 250kline (of perl, think at least 5-10 mil of Java) to a modern version of perl with changes to around 50 lines of code.

Note that knowing perl well is quite a commitment and counter to current fashion in the industry.

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