An upgraded version of App::Cpan and the cpan command

The cpan command comes with the CPAN.pm distribution, and is also a core module. The main repo is behind on several patches to cpan, so this repo is what cpan should be.

Installation

Install App::Cpan::Upgraded like any other module.

% cpan App::Cpan::Upgraded

This provides App::Cpan::Upgraded and a cpan command. This command also comes with perl and depends on the standard library version of CPAN.pm. The upgraded version is compatible with CPAN.pm, although it fixes some various problems within the cpan command.

Some history

• I wrote cpan some time before 2002, The cpan-script has some of the details.
• cpan was imported into the CPAN.pm repo around July 2002.
• I turned cpan (v1.3) into a script distribution in December 2002
• For awhile, there was parallel development with CPAN.pm grabbing my changes from cpan-script.
• I wrote App::Cpan to make the cpan script a module. This was distributed as its own module for awhile (under BDFOY) and synced into CPAN.pm
• At some point, we decided to do all the development in the CPAN.pm repo and I shut down cpan-script.
• App::Cpan and cpan were moved to the CPAN.pm repo, and I'd make pull requests to update or fix things.
• My last merged pull request is from December 2021 (andk/cpanpm#153)
• Around November 2022, I evaluated all of the issues in RT and made GitHub issues for them. I took supplied patches and made pull requests. These received no response. No issues have received responses from the maintainers since then.
• In December 2023, I pinged each of these with no response. I also emailed Andreas to ask what I could do to help, and he declined my assistance.
• In December 2024 I asked if I should fork cpan. No response.
• And, here we are. Code that I wrote exists in a distro that does not respond to issues and won't let me fix my own code.
• In January 2025, I started this updated version of cpan backed by App::Cpan::Upgraded.