Tidy up your CPAN author directory, increase your Schwartz!
I used to encourage people to help CPAN Increase its Schwartz by making the ratio of the byte size of just the latest versions to all versions as high as possible. It's time to increase the schwartz again. Think of it as Spring cleaning (Autumn for you southern folks) for your CPAN directory.
Many people are arguing on the CPAN workers mailing list about who's opinion about rsyncing mirrors is the most worthy. While they huff and puff, you can help with just a couple minutes of your time.
If you have cruft in your CPAN directory that can safely live on BackPAN (which has everything ever uploaded), you can help keep the size of CPAN manageable by deleting that cruft. It's not so much the byte-size but the file size. In my CPAN mirror right now there is a bit over 120,000 files, so even if you think that your puny module going away won't do much good, its deletion reduces the file count as much as BioPerl or Number::Phone deleting one of theirs.
Simply log into your PAUSE account, follow the delete files link, and schedule some files for deletion. They go away after three days. You have the option to change your mind too. The files only disappear from PAUSE: they'll still be on BackPAN so you'll always have them.
I'm the author of Mastering Perl, and the co-author of Learning Perl (6th Edition), Intermediate Perl, Programming Perl (4th Edition) and Effective Perl Programming (2nd Edition).
FYI, if you're trying to be inclusive of "southern folks", the word you're looking for is 'autumn' :-)
A timely reminder nonetheless.
I just solved 0.03% of your problem (due at Fri, 02 Apr 2010 03:19:52 GMT).
Deleted most old versions of my modules. 95 files gone :-)