It's Earth Day - time to clean up CPAN!

By Ether on April 22, 2016 9:37 AM

Happy Earth Day 2016!

Fortuitiously, Earth Day this year falls during the QA Hackathon in Rugby, UK. Earth Day is a great time to clean up old distributions in one's CPAN directory, to save storage space on the countless CPAN mirrors and generally reduce clutter. To do this, I run my cleanup script, available here.

By default, it looks in ~/.pause to find PAUSE credentials, or you can specify them on the command line. It uses WWW::Mechanize to access https://pause.perl.org and deletes all distribution uploads except the last two stable releases (also preserving any trial/alpha releases in between), so it should be safe -- but files aren't actually deleted for three days, so you have time to check what decisions were made and make changes.

This script was written by Ricardo Signes (rjbs) -- I just made a few small modifications!

So far, rjbs has ticked 172 ticky boxes, and I ticked 603.

I'd like to thank the sponsors for making the QA Hackathon possible: FastMail, ActiveState, ZipRecruiter, Strato, SureVoIP, CV-Library, thinkproject!, MongoDB, Infinity, Dreamhost, Perl 6, Perl Careers, Evozon, Booking, Eligo, Oetiker+Partner, CAPSiDE, Perl Services, Procura, Constructor.io, Robbie Bow, Ron Savage, Charlie Gonzalez, Justin Cook, and my employer, Campus Explorer.