The Perl NOC have informed the PAUSE admins that the CPAN Master is starting to get tight on diskspace. This is only a temporary constraint — at some point there will be a lot more space, but for now we need to free up some space.

A lot of space is being taken up by old releases, long since superseded. Please delete these old releases if you have some, and the NOC will stop being alerted.

Remember: everything you've ever released to CPAN will always be available in your BackPAN author directory. My PAUSE id is NEILB, so my BackPAN directory is:

There are two ways you can clean up your CPAN directory:

Use this script to clean it up. Originally written by RJBS, it was evolved by David Golden. It keeps all alphas later than a stable release, keeps up to 3 stable releases, and deletes everything else. David says "use at your own risk, of course". Log into PAUSE, click on Delete Files in the sidebar, click on the checkboxes next to all old releases, and hit the "Delete" button at the bottom of the page.

If you need any help, you can email modules at perl dot org, or drop into the #toolchain channel on irc.perl.org .

The NOC identified the authors with the biggest directories, and I wrote a script to identify the distributions where we can make the biggest savings, even across multiple authors. We're emailing these people directly.

Thanks for your help.