Tip of the day: version-independent location of a CPAN distribution's Changes file

[Anton Berezin]

Hi,

Some time ago several people (most notably skv@) ranted about including a
list of changes or a link to such list in the commit message for a port
update.

I thought it was a great idea and started including a link to a CPAN's
distribution Changes file in my commits some time ago.

What I did not like was that those links looked like this:

  http://search.cpan.org/src/JESSE/Template-Declare-0.27/Changes

FreeBSD's commit messages are preserved in our repository and mail archives
forever, for a suitable definition of "forever".  On the other hand, CPAN
authors are encouraged to clean up old and obsolete versions promptly.

Thus there is a discrepancy between expected time of life of the link in the
commit message and the link contents.

While older CPAN distributions can still be found on
http://backpan.cpan.org/, it only provides links to tarballs and not
individual files like Changes.

Luckily, it turns out that version-less links like

  http://search.cpan.org/dist/Template-Declare/Changes

work just fine, redirecting to the most recent version of the file.  This is
acceptable, since Changes is expected to be a prepend-only file, so the
information the commit message was trying to link to can (almost) always be
found there.

Cheers,
\Anton.
-- 
We're going for 'working' here. 'clean' is for people with skills...
-- Flemming Jacobsen