When is the last time you used a CPAN distribution whose last release date was more than five years ago? I don't mean just in hacking around or for research purposes. I'm talking about something that mattered, that lived somewhere other than your development machine and could be seen/used by other people. Even if you have an answer for me, it's certainly going to be the single exception to a vastly superior rule, no?

For the vast majority of my searches, I really couldn't give a fluff about anything last released in 2007 or earlier. I'm not advocating removal or anything (or am I?) but the language and its developers move on. Shouldn't CPAN?

I can’t be the only one to think that it would be a HUGE and immediate benefit to every single developer in the Perl community (new or ninja) to be able to filter any CPAN search based on the latest release date of a distribution (or the parent distribution in the case of a module). Am I crazy? Why hasn't this been done?

If it hasn't and someone doesn't do it before I'm finished with my current project, I'm going to sit down and see about finally figuring out the MetaCPAN API. It looks incredibly powerful (certainly powerful enough to handle something like this) but I have a limited space in my brain reserved for search syntaxes and that's all used up by perlre and Google.

Oh to be able to use perl regular expressions and Google search operators into MetaCPAN's search box... Now there's a search engine I'd like to use...

name:({Class Package Module Object} -^(Devel|Acme))        \
nsexclude:{Devel Acme}                                     \
distupdate:"after 2009"                                    \
abstract:(accessor mutator data config)                    \
-cpanauthor:billg                                          \
-depends:{M(o|oo|ouse|oose) Catalyst Dancer Mojolicious}