Fake CPAN FAQ

What's the Fake CPAN?

The Fake CPAN is actually a collection of versioned, fake CPANs. A published fake CPAN version should never change. When an update is available, it will get a new URL. Starting with http://fakecpan.org/, fake CPAN URLs look like this:

    http://fakecpan.org/fake/IDENTIFIER/VERSION/cpan

Each fake CPAN is part of a series with a unique identifier. An identifier is a bunch of words composed of letters and hyphens, matching the following Perl 5 regular expression:

    / \A (?:[a-z]+-)* [a-z]+ \z/x

The version part is determined by the fake CPAN series, but will follow the same semantics as a Perl $VERSION value. Putting it all together, the package index for v1.234 of the example series would be found at:

    http://fakecpan.org/fake/example/v1.234/cpan/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz

The string latest may always be used in place of a version to reach the latest version of a given fake.

Each version contains all the files you expect:

    modules/02packages.details.txt.gz
    modules/03modlist.data.gz
    authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
    authors/id/A/AU/AUTHOR/Dist-1.00.tar.gz
    ...

The following other resources are expected to exist:

    http://fakecpan.org/fake/IDENTIFIER/VERSION/...
    about.txt  - a description of the fake
    policy.txt - a description of how the contents may be expected to change
                 over time (this helps users understand how to write test code
                 that will be forward compatible)

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