CPAN

Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2009–2024), in 13 threads.

People raised many different problems with CPAN, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 13 complaints

Asks about 20 questions and runs a slow mirror test, hard to automate2024-07-08
Installing Perl modules from CPAN is very slow compared to Go imports2024-06-17
CPAN modules are buggy and fiddly, leading to repeated failures2022-07-10
CPAN installs often fail with odd errors partway through building2020-06-21
Installing modules from CPAN was the most common complaint; a new client didn't help2020-01-11
Outdated documentation online suggests a shell command that can upgrade perl unexpectedly2019-08-29
Modules often fail to compile during installation, forcing the user to troubleshoot2018-10-24
Installs take 40 minutes, auto-select a broken mirror, and produce pages of build output2015-10-07
Website is hard to browse; users must switch to MetaCPAN, which is also hard to navigate2014-02-24
Regex argument to cpan upgrade fails with confusing errors, forcing a workaround2013-06-30
Install prompts and noisy output make failures hard to diagnose; takes very long2011-01-09
Can't easily find which BackPAN file holds a specific package version; must download and index everything2009-11-10
Many packages broken, uninstallable or poorly documented, costing more time than writing from scratch2009-07-17