Lately, I’ve been working improving the CPAN.pm user experience, particularly with regards to configuration. I’ve already made CPAN.pm autoconfiguration quieter, and now I’m working on letting it automatically choose mirrors for you. Here’s sample output from my work in progress:
cpan[3]> o conf init urllist Now you need to choose your CPAN mirror sites. You can let me pick mirrors for you, you can select them from a list or you can enter them by hand. Would you like me to automatically choose the best CPAN mirror sites for you? (This means connecting to the Internet and could take a couple minutes) [yes] Searching for the best CPAN mirrors (please be patient) ............................................................................................................. done! New urllist http://mirror.datapipe.net/CPAN/ http://cpan-du.viaverio.com/ http://cpan.mirror.facebook.net/ http://mirrors.24-7-solutions.net/pub/CPAN/ http://cpan.belfry.net/ commit: wrote '/home/david/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm'
When I’m done, I hope that a novice Perl programmer can be downloading from CPAN within a couple minutes of running the CPAN client for the first time.