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)

Fake CPAN site hosted by
(code (simply))