To celebrate CPAN Day, NEILB and BOOK are proud to announce a new CPAN-related site, specifically targetted towards playing with CPAN (with the underlying goal of improving it).

Please join us in celebrating the first the day of cpan.io!

The site is rather empty now, but we have grand plans for it. Come play the CPAN game with us, fork cpan.io on github and send us patches and feature requests.

Regularly, CPAN authors are reminded that CPAN is a large collection of files, mirrored all over the world, and that it would be nice to keep its size reasonable.

Over the last twelve years, we've seen regular calls to remove old versions of distributions from CPAN. Because I'm too lazy to look for more, I'll point to the earliest and the most recent I could find.

My topic for today is not just removing old releases, but actually removing all the versions of a published distribution from CPAN (thus making it disappear entirely, except from BackPAN).

Here are some good reasons to do this:

• the module was an experiment and the experiment failed
• the module serves no purpose any more
• the module is interfacing with an online service that has disappeared or radically changed (i.e. the other half of the equation has disappeared entirely -- this is different from interfacing with an obsolete library: old code never dies)
• it will live forever on BackPAN -- in suspended animation

Having lost interest or not being able to maintain the code any more are not valid reasons to remove a distribution from CPAN, but they are good reasons to make ADOPTME a maintainer.

So, if you've got an old distribution that doesn't belong on CPAN any more, maybe you could consider removing it on CPAN Day?