A Celebration
Posted on 11th August 2014
August the 16th is CPAN Day. Its the day that is marked as the first upload to CPAN. CPAN came into existence in July/August 1995, but on August 16th 1995 Andreas König made the first true upload to the archive. And so began a growth that is continuing and growing to this day. Jumping ahead to several weeks ago, Neil Bowers decided to make a big deal about this day. After all we celebrate Perl's birthday, why not celebrate CPAN too.
Neil has been posting several ideas for how you can improve distributions on CPAN, with the aim of making several releases on CPAN Day. With that aim in mind, Neil posted some stats and graphs to show what has happened on CPAN Day in previous years. I did some data mining and came up with a page to help monitor CPAN Day. I sent the link to Neil, who then came up with several suggestions. Trying to create the graphs proved interesting, and thanks to everyone on Twitter who sent me various links to help out.
The page has expanded slightly and includes the neoCPANisms, which Neil has been monitoring. NeoCPANism being the number of new distributions that have never been uploaded to CPAN before. It will be interesting to see how many new distributions get released on CPAN Day, as the biggest day of new release was nearly 2 years ago, with 41 new distributions release on the same day.
The page is now created in real time (well every 5 minutes) so you can see how we're progressing throughout the day. The page is now available at stats.cpantesters.org/uploads.html. You can watch progress for each day now, not just CPAN Day, but let's see if we can reach the suggested target on Saturday :)
Comments
Daily dashboard
Thanks for creating this -- I know the first thing I'll be looking at when I wake up on CPAN Day!Posted by Neil Bowers on Tuesday, 12th August 2014
