While working on Pinto, I discovered that a fair number of distributions on CPAN have invalid or incomplete metadata. This makes it hard for the toolchain (Pinto especially) to fully utilize them.

Usually the offenses are pretty minor -- misspelled or missing keys in the META files, or a non-parsable version number. Some of us have probably made local patches of these distributions to fix those problems. But there's no reason everyone should have to do it.

So I had an idea -- what if there was a secondary public CPAN where fo…

Ok, that title is a bit of a teaser. But I do think that code should be sexy. In this full-color high-definition world, we've come to expect things to actually look attractive.

I'd love to see pretty logos or icons for each module on MetaCPAN. Perhaps we could add a new attribute to the META spec that points to an image file inside the distribution, or a URL somewhere.

I used to feel the Perl core should be as small as possible. That is, it should ship with the smallest number of modules whilst still being "practical". For everything else, there is CPAN.

So naturally, I was pretty pleased when I heard that CGI and some other modules were going to be removed from the core in perl 5.20. But lately, I've started to change my view on that. Here is why...

My FLOSS Weekly interview on Pinto is now online here:

http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly/246

Big thanks to Randal Schwartz and Aaron Newcomb for having me on the show!

I'll be doing a live webcast about Pinto with Randal Schwartz for FLOSS Weekly. Tune in to http://live.twit.tv next Wednesday, March 27 at 08:30 (Pacific Time) to the see the show. Your can send in your questions in real-time via the #twitlive channel on irc.twit.tv.

Pinto is a robust tool for creating custom CPAN-like repositories of Perl modules. You can fill your repository with any combination of private and public…