Intermediate Perl

Chapter 19. Contributing to CPAN

Besides allowing others in your organization to receive the benefits of these wonderful modules and distributions you’ve created, you can contribute to the Perl community at large. The mechanism for sharing your work is called the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), which is 10 years old as we write this and has about 9,000 different modules.

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.^[*]

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.

Getting Prepared

Since CPAN is just a big file-storage site, you just need to upload your code. To contribute to CPAN, you need two things:

• Something to contribute, ideally already in the shape of a module

• A Perl Authors Upload Server (PAUSE) ID

The PAUSE ID is your passport to contributing to CPAN. You get a PAUSE ID by simply asking. The details are described at ...