Please delete old releases from your CPAN directory
The Perl NOC have informed the PAUSE admins that the CPAN Master is starting to get tight on diskspace. This is only a temporary constraint — at some point there will be a lot more space, but for now we need to free up some space.
A lot of space is being taken up by old releases, long since superseded. Please delete these old releases if you have some, and the NOC will stop being alerted.
Remember: everything you've ever released to CPAN will always be available in your BackPAN author directory. My PAUSE id is NEILB, so my BackPAN directory is:
There are two ways you can clean up your CPAN directory:
Use this script to clean it up. Originally written by RJBS, it was evolved by David Golden. It keeps all alphas later than a stable release, keeps up to 3 stable releases, and deletes everything else. David says "use at your own risk, of course".
Log into PAUSE, click on Delete Files in the sidebar, click on the checkboxes next to all old releases, and hit the "Delete" button at the bottom of the page.
If you need any help, you can email modules at perl dot org, or drop into the #toolchain
channel on irc.perl.org
.
The NOC identified the authors with the biggest directories, and I wrote a script to identify the distributions where we can make the biggest savings, even across multiple authors. We're emailing these people directly.
Thanks for your help.
This post might reach a few hundred readers. Far from the number of CPAN authors. It won't even reach the majority of active CPAN authors.
Wouldn't it make sense to write a script that will go over the directories on PAUSE and send e-mails to the people who use the most disk space and/or who have many (e.g. more than 5) releases of the same distribution?
Hi Gabor. I meant to mention that we've identified the heavy hitters, both in terms of authors and distributions, and have started emailing them directly. I'll update the post.
You said that "This post might reach a few hundred readers". I'm hoping that via the Perl Weekly it might reach quite a few more than that :-)
Agree with Gabor, that this should be done via direct mailing. And few more things:
Hi Alexander,
On the automatic cleanup of PAUSE: this has been discussed a number of times. It's a hairy topic, which is why no-one's taken it on, but you're right, we should make it happen.
I've opened a github issue for this, and if nothing's happened by then, I'll raise it for next year's QA Hackathon.
Use ceph with ssd+platter disks?
Hi Dean: turns out I hadn't read the email from the NOC closely enough. The tight diskspace will eventually be resolved, we just need to clear some space to see us through.
This is the script I use, which fixes a few bugs in rjbs's original: https://github.com/karenetheridge/misc/blob/master/install/generic/bin/pause-cleanup