What is CPAN6?

CPAN6 is designed to be the follow-up of CPAN, Perl5's module archive, as a way to distribute released material. The main differences are:

• it creates any amount of archives and helps you maintain them, where CPAN is only one archive,
• it is not limited to use with perl5; it can be used for any collection of data,
• it adds trust in publisher and security during transport, and
• it keeps track on license and copyright issues.

CPAN6 handles bundles of archives, and has as such no equivalent as we know of. It can be used to simplify the administrative tasks of ftp-server maintainers, but also organize a companies internal software distribution.

CPAN6 is still in its design stages. Here you can read more about the plans and the progress of development.

• Global design document of CPAN6/Pause6, in postscript and pdf; 2006-09-01
• CPAN6 implementation design, in postscript and pdf; 2006-09-01
• Pause6 implementation design, in postscript and pdf; 2006-09-01
• Presentation at YAPC::EU 2006, in openoffice and powerpoint; 2006-09-01

When you are interested in the development of CPAN6, you can register for (one of) our mailinglists:

• Pause6 mailinglist, about the CPAN6 infrastructure and Pause6 archive administration internals. Register
• Tools mailinglist: about (platform dependent) client-side download and upload tools. Register