[sivoais]

Perl's CPAN has tooling for diffing versions through the use of MetaCPAN (a top-notch site which every language should try to emulate). For example, here is a diff of the URI distribution:

https://metacpan.org/diff/file?target=ETHER%2FURI-1.71%2F&so...

This information is also available through an API for integration into command line tools.

[mfer]

IIRC, and I could be wrong, CPAN was the first to go down the route that many modern toolchains now provide. We've looked at it.

In fact, the original creator of Glide (Go package manager) wrote about Perl and CPAN when talking about Go at http://technosophos.com/2015/09/02/dont-let-go-be-condemned-....

[sivoais]

Yeah, I think it was. The only thing older was probably CTAN, but it didn't have the same structure.

Other things from the Perl ecosystem that should be copied are:

- CPAN Testers which automatically tests every package on multiple systems from Windows to Solaris. This helps identify portability, backcompat, and regression issues.

- CPAN mirrors which ensure that there isn't a single point of failure. This might not be as important now with fast networks and high uptimes, but it also ensures that everyone can replicate all of the code at anytime. I believe R's CRAN does this.

[berntb]

CPAN Testers also test on different operating system versions. And hence also test the Perl binaries, for a lot of different versions, by literally running the combined test suites for all of the (public) Perl code.

I really, really don't get why this isn't copied to the rest of the open source language environments. (Masochism? :-) )

[rurban]

Well, yes. But CPAN does not provide src urls via git (github, sourceforge, ...). You need to upload your tar.gz to a central repo which is then distributed via mirrors.

All modern packagers provide now such src urls, esp. go went ahead with this idea.