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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah CPAN is easy to take for granted now that every language has its own package manager (npm, cargo, pip), and even for C/C++ you can find what you want on GitHub. At the time though CPAN was revolutionary and no one else had it. To be able to just search for a module, find one that did what you wanted, then download it to your project was pure magic.

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There is some question whether CTAN (for TeX) or CPAN was the first big library. It was pretty close. I was involved tangentially with the guys in the UK who were setting up the first pass at CTAN as the administrator of the ymir.claremont.edu archive and I remember one of the things that they came up with back then was that you could do an FTP get of any directory and get back a zip archive of its contents which was pretty fancy in the 90s. That said, both CPAN and CTAN definitely show their age in that they assume a single version of dependencies will be installed on any system which causes untold nightmares when it turns out that there’s a non-backwards compatible update to something three dependencies deep that you weren’t even aware you were using.

>There is some question whether CTAN (for TeX) or CPAN was the first big library.

I'm not in this space, but the similarity in names made me wonder if these would really have started around the same time, with an unclear "dependency order", so I reached for a search engine, and according to Wikipedia, CPAN (1993) is based on CTAN (1992).

See also The Timeline of Perl and its Culture https://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html

> There is some question whether CTAN (for TeX) or CPAN was the first big library.

There isn't "some question", there is a definite answer, namely in "Programming Perl" and I quote the 4th edition, page 629:

History

Toward the end of 1993, Tim Bunce, Jarkko Hietaniemi, and Andreas König set up the perl-packrats mailing list to discuss the idea of an archive for all the Perl 4 stuff floating around the Internet. Perl 5 development had started that year, and one of its main features would be an extensible module system that would allow people to extend the language without changing perl. Jared Rhine suggested he idea of a central repository, but nothing much happened. His idea had come from CTAN (http://www.ctan.org), the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network.

Edit: fix markup

>assume a single version of dependencies will be installed on any system which causes untold nightmares when it turns out that there’s a non-backwards compatible update to something three dependencies deep that you weren’t even aware you were using.

I may not completely understand what you're describing, but with perlbrew managing different Perl versions, and various CPAN clients installing modules in versioned libraries - as well as the test/smoke servers that test CPAN on tons of versions of Perl for Perl CPAN authors automatically, I don't know if I've come across what you're describing.

What's still a pita is when there's an outside dependency from the Perl ecosystem that breaks a module, but I'm not sure that's Perl's fault.

It happens more with CTAN where there is no possibility of a testing framework and there is no ability for multiple versions of an artifact to coexist.

As far as I know, https://cpantesters.org/ is still unrivaled though. None of those have the level of testing that CPAN Testers provides.

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