> Luckily, there is now a viable
> alternative: MetaCPAN.org[...]
This is somewhat of a revisionist history. MetaCPAN has been around in a form where it's been a good search.cpan.org replacement since 2012 at least, but for some reason that whatever set of people that run perl.org haven't wanted to switch serch.cpan.org over.
I'm very grateful to the effort of Graham Barr in creating serch.cpan.org, and fully understand that he may have his own reasons for never open sourcing it, and I respect that.
But at the same time it's really odd that the Perl project has been willing to run proprietary code on one of its main landing pages for almost a decade when a viable open source alternative has been available.
From what I have been able to gather, MetaCPAN was the planned replacement for search.cpan.org and the reason it took forever to transition was to guarantee a perfect handover and minimal to no issues(linkrot, API problems, etc) upon the shutdown of the search.cpan.org servers.
They spent a good deal of time making a perfect drag and drop replacement and I think it went very well.
Sad you're being downvoted with what is -- as far as I know -- an entirely accurate description, and a valid point. It was weird that search.cpan.org remained closed-source for so long.
I'm very grateful to the effort of Graham Barr in creating serch.cpan.org, and fully understand that he may have his own reasons for never open sourcing it, and I respect that.
But at the same time it's really odd that the Perl project has been willing to run proprietary code on one of its main landing pages for almost a decade when a viable open source alternative has been available.