Changes/Perl Move to MetaCPAN

Perl Move to MetaCPAN

Summary

search.cpan.org web frontend for CPAN is being replaced by metacpan.org. Many Perl RPM packages refer to search.cpan.org. This Fedora change aims to mass-update URL and Source RPM tags in affected Perl packages.

Owner

• Name: Petr Písař
• Email: <ppisar@redhat.com>
• Release notes owner:

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 29
• Last updated: 2018-06-04
• Tracker bug: #1585624
• Release Notes tracking: #176

Completed items

• Update packaging guidelines
• Develop regular expressions for address rewrite
  • URL: s{\Ahttp://(?:(?i)search\.cpan\.org)/(?:dist|~[^/]+)/([^/]+)/?\s*\z}{https://metacpan.org/release/$1}
  • Source: s{\Ahttps?://(?:(?:(?i)www\.cpan\.org)(?:/CPAN)?|(?:(?i)search\.cpan\.org)/CPAN)/+(authors/id/|modules/by-module/|modules/by-authors/id/)}{https://cpan.metacpan.org/$1}
• Gather list of Perl packages
  • Packages containing old strings: 2852
• Dry-run mass-update script to validate output and identify issues
• Update affected specification files
• Manually update (invalid or not automatically rewritable or special):
  • perl-Crypt-Blowfish_PP

Items in progress

• Manually update (invalid or not automatically rewritable or special):
  • perl
  • perl-Data-AMF
  • perl-Text-Kakasi

Detailed Description

Fedora packages store URL to the upstream web page and URL to the source archive location in their metadata. Most of the Perl packages uses search.cpan.org for this purpose. However, search.cpan.org won't be the canonical source anymore. We should update the metadata to point to the new location.

Specification for all Perl packages will be updated like this:

-URL:            http://search.cpan.org/dist/CPANPLUS/
+URL:            https://metacpan.org/release/CPANPLUS
-Source0:        http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/B/BI/BINGOS/CPANPLUS-%{cpan_version}.tar.gz
-Source0:        http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/B/BI/BINGOS/CPANPLUS-%{cpan_version}.tar.gz
+Source0:        https://cpan.metacpan.org/authors/id/B/BI/BINGOS/CPANPLUS-%{cpan_version}.tar.gz

This change will be pushed as one commit into each affected Perl package without increasing its release number. We will try to do this change before Perl 5.28 mass rebuild in order to have it visible in Fedora 29 binary repositories.

Benefit to Fedora

Provide up-to-date home page in package descriptions to Fedora users. Fetch sources into Fedora infrastructure directly from upstream location.

Scope

• Proposal owners: Rewrite URL and Source addresses in Perl package specification files.

• Other developers: Make sure the new addresses are correct.

• Release engineering: Review ticket
  • List of deliverables: Does not block any deliverables.

• Policies and guidelines: Perl packaging guidelines will be updated.

• Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

This change has no impact on run-time.

How To Test

Package rebuilt after this change won't display search.cpan.org in rpm -qi output.

User Experience

URL in in RPM packages uses metacpan.org instead of search.cpan.org.

Dependencies

There are no dependencies.

Contingency Plan

In case the new addresses won't work, we will revert them in the specification files and in the Perl packaging guidelines.

Documentation

• search.cpan.org – the old web interface
• metacpan.org – the new web interface
• Perl NOC announcement
• Perl packaging guidelines
• Discussion on perl-devel Fedora mailing list
• Announcement on devel Fedora mailing list
• Anitya CPAN backend update request
• Perl packaging guidelines update request
• Releng review request
• cpanspec tool update request

Release Notes

This change does not need to be highlighted in the release notes.