force CPAN(PLUS) upgrades?

Let me just mention this again:  all we have to do to let the outdated 
cpan clients know they are broken is to move/rename/reformat a few 
files:

  authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
  modules/02packages.details.txt.gz
  modules/03modlist.data.gz

Of course, that's going to give a lot of people a bad day because the 
CPAN client they have won't be able to upgrade[1].  And of course 
there's probably more than just CPAN(PLUS).pm referencing those.

Maybe there's a better place to put the bullet, but I think we've talked 
about compatibility long enough.  Can we start seriously talking about 
end-of-life'ing the broken stuff, make sure the new versions can 
self-upgrade, and move on?

[1] Unless the indices are stripped-down to include *only* references to 
the latest CPAN(PLUS) files?  Or, maybe just freeze their contents at a 
given moment?

--Eric
-- 
perl -e 'srand; print join(" ",sort({rand() < 0.5}
  qw(sometimes it is important to be consistent)));'
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    http://scratchcomputing.com
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• force CPAN(PLUS) upgrades? by Eric Wilhelm