CPAN Question

[QoS]

I would like to download and install a package from CPAN
but it says '** UNAUTHORIZED RELEASE **'.

What does this message mean? How did this package obtain this unfortunate
label?

Is it potentially a bad thing to use this package because of this
message?

Thanks for any insight

J

 

[brian d foy]

I would like to download and install a package from CPAN
but it says '** UNAUTHORIZED RELEASE **'.

That's a particular solution to a bit of nastiness one of the CPAN
developers tried to get away with recently.

An "Unauthorixed Release" is one by someone not registered to upload to
that namespace. Since anyone can upload anything to CPAN, people can
try to overwrite the work of other people. CPAN is a bit smarter than
that, though, and tracks who's the authoritative source for each
package.

I can't comment on why you saw that tag because you didn't mention
which module it applied to, but sometimes this merely means that there
is a problem with the co-maintainer permissions.

 

[QoS]

For which package did this occur? It usually happens when a
package that is co-maintained by a group of people gets updated
by someone who wasn't assigned all the neccessary permission bits,
as it's easy to forget passing permissions back and forth.

With some modules this has also happened when the author integrated
submodules into the distribution that were previously released
standalone by someone else and they forgot to transfer permissions,
or when he included some modules for testing purposes that stem
from another package and don't get installed, but missed to point
that out in the META.yml. I believe one of those is currently the
case with GD and Mail::SpamAssassin.

But it can also happen if someone, intentionally or by mistake,
uploads a different package into an already existing namespace.

-Chris

Thank you for this information, the package is called Perl::Critic

 

[QoS]

I would like to download and install a package from CPAN
but it says '** UNAUTHORIZED RELEASE **'.

What does this message mean? How did this package obtain this unfortunate
label?

Is it potentially a bad thing to use this package because of this
message?

Thanks for any insight

J

Thank you for all the interesting background on this topic,
and for checking out the Perl::Critic package.

I have installed the package and it seems to work fine for me too.