Programming Perl, 4th Edition

PAUSE

PAUSE is the gateway to CPAN for contributors. Before you can upload anything, you need an account. It’s free and easy. One of the PAUSE administrators will check your application, mostly as just a check against bots, and then set up the account.

Once you have the account, you can upload your work to PAUSE. You can upload almost anything that you like. PAUSE doesn’t care about what you are doing or how well you do it.

When you upload a distribution, the PAUSE indexer looks through your archive for any Perl namespaces that you might have used. There are no restrictions on which namespaces you can use, but PAUSE keeps a list of people it thinks are authorized to modify a namespace.

• The first author to use a namespace gets first-come permissions and becomes the primary maintainer.

• The primary maintainer can assign co-maintainer permissions to another author (or many authors).

• The primary maintainer can give up that status to another author.

If you upload a distribution that uses a namespace for which you don’t have one of these permissions, the PAUSE indexer refuses to index the module and sends you an error. It still accepts your upload, however, and it will still show up on CPAN. People will be able to download it. However, since the indexer did not index it, your distribution will not show up in the database PAUSE creates. If your module doesn’t show up in the database, the CPAN clients won’t know about it and won’t be able to install it. PAUSE just skips your distribution, and ...