lcpan is an application to manage your local CPAN mirror. It downloads mini CPAN to your computer, and creates a SQLite database from information in the mirror so you can query various stuffs about your mirror.

Up until version 0.66, lcpan only indexes modules/02packages.details.txt.gz (for list of modules/packages), authors/01mailrc.txt.gz (list of authors), and META files from each release tarballs (dist names, dist abstract, dependency information).

Now in 0.67, a lot more stuffs are being indexed. Size and mtime of release tarballs, content (list of files) inside each tarball, scripts. lcpan also extracts abstract for each module and script. It also parses POD to get mentions, which is references to modules/scripts.

So now in addition to dependencies relationship, we also get mentions relationship. Want to know what modules/scripts/authors mentions your modules in their POD? Or what modules and authors are most popular in terms of being most mentioned? Now you can.