Every release you do to CPAN stays in your author directory until you choose to delete it. Sometimes you might want your old releases to stay available, but most of the time you could happily delete them (they're always available on BackPAN). Space is getting short on the CPAN Master, so please tidy up your author directory. I've written a script to identify the biggest hoarders, and have started emailing the top of the list, asking them to free up some space. You can use the script to see (roughly) how much space you could free up.

When I've released a new version of a dist, after a few days I'm happy to delete any previous releases, if I remember to.

To make your life easier, RJBS wrote this script (modified by DAGOLDEN), which will automatically clean up your author directory, saving just the last 3 releases. ETHER has modified that script. You can also use the Delete files function in the PAUSE web interface, to manually schedule the deletion of old releases.

It's easy to identify the people taking up the most space, but they're typically people who've done a lot of releases of Perl 5 itself. What we're really interested in is how much space people are taking up with old releases.

So I've written a script called cpan-cullers, which does just that. To find the top 20 offenders:

cpan-cullers | head -20

Or to find how much space a particular user could free up:

cpan-cullers | grep NEILB 1574. 329978 : NEILB

I'm the 1574th worst offender, and could free up 330k. That'll be zero soon — there's a 3-day delay when you schedule files for deletion.

Please do your bit.

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