gistfile1.txt

TITLE

    Perl6 and CPAN

AUTHOR

    Justin DeVuyst (jdv79)

BODY

    In the Perl5 world, just in case anyone is unaware, CPAN is a major factor.
    Its basically the hub of the Perl5 world.

    What I am referring to here as CPAN is not just the mirrored collection of
    32K+ distributions.  Its the ecosystem that's built up around that
    collection.  This ecosystem has many parts, some more important than others
    depending on who you talk to, but the most important parts to me are:

    * the mirrored distribution collection
    * pause
    * metacpan
    * cpan testers
    * module installers

    These are the 5 aspects of "CPAN" that I'd like to see happen for Perl6.
    One way to get that would be to write the whole thing from scratch in Perl6.
    While it may sound cool in some sort of dogfoody and/or boostrappy kind of
    way to some it sounds like a lot of work to me and we're a bit strapped for
    developer resources.  Another way would be to add support for Perl6 to the
    existing CPAN bits.  The hope there being, primarily, that it'd be a lot
    less work.  The latter approach is what I've been working on lately.
    And if we want to refactor ourselves off the Perl5 bits in the future we
    can take our time doing it;  later.

    At this time we have:

    * basic pause support
    * a metacpan prototype

    So we can publish Perl6 distributions to CPAN and search that collection.
    Well, sort of on that last bit.  The metacpan prototype instance is not
    currently tracking CPAN.  Its actually been loaded up with Perl6
    distributions from the Perl6 module ecosystem (modules.perl6.org) for
    testing.  But hopefully soon we'll have an official Perl6 metacpan instance,
    separate from the Perl5 instance, that will track CPAN's Perl6 content as it
    should.

    What we need next is:

    * completion of basic metacpan Perl6 support
    * at least one Perl6 module installer to support CPAN (probably panda)
    * Perl6 integration with cpan testers

    If anyone is interested in working on any of this stuff please stop by
    #perl6 on freenode.  If nobody else is able to help you I'll (jdv79) do
    my best.