Section 19.1.  The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network

19.1. The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network

We covered the basic CPAN history in Chapter 3, but that was from a user's perspective. Now we want to contribute to CPAN, so we have to look at it from an author's perspective.

It's no accident that CPAN is so useful. The ethos of the project has been that anyone should be able to contribute and that it should be easy for people to share their work. Because of that, it has more than 9,000 modules (as we write this) and is the model that other languages wish they could adopt.^[*]

^[*] However, whenever the discussion comes up in other languages, the first thing they do is try to set restrictions, which CPAN purposedly avoided.

Remember that CPAN is just a big storage device. That's its magic. Everything else that revolves around it, such as CPAN Search (http://search.cpan.org), CPAN.pm, and CPANPLUS.pm, merely use what's already there, not create what it is.