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For the ever growing number of Perl users at CERN it is without doubt interesting to know that (in anology with the CTAN archives for TeX) there now exists ``CPAN'' (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) whose aim is to be The Perl archive, i.e. the only Perl archive one will ever need to consult to find Perl code and information.
At present CPAN is still very much under construction and, since there are many Perl-related resources spread across the Internet and it will probably take some time before all of them will end up with a copy on CPAN.
The basic principle of CPAN is ``being distributed''. It would be quite frankly impossible to coordinate the numerous resources so that all the people contributing Perl material would enter their contributions into some central site. Therefore, most of the contents of CPAN is mirrored from other sites, with CPAN just pulling all the various resources together and presenting them as a (hopefully) coherent whole.
Files on the server are classified in the various categories:
The URL ftp://ftp.switch.ch/mirror/CPAN/README.html is the home of the Swiss CPAN node. Many other sites (in Europe, N. America and elsewere) exist (see the file CTAN.html at the above URL to choose the node closest to you. The master CPAN site is at funet (Finland, Europe) (ftp.funet.fi).