"Critical" projects and volunteer maintainers

"Critical" projects and volunteer maintainers

I would argue that CPAN, at least, is not an attempt to reinvent distributions, since it was created around the same time as the first Linux distributions. It has been in service since 1995, and distributions have changed a lot about the way they work since then. Not to mention that any system designed to distribute libraries in 1995 that restricted itself to Linux just wasn't fit for purpose. I would argue it isn't fit for purpose today, since many developers today aren't working on Linux. Leaving out all developers who work on non-Linux OSes wasn't sensible in 1995, and it still isn't today.