Since a couple of days, MetaCPAN changed their ways of fighting AI scrapers, according to [0] with some service called "signalsciences". Which, according to [1] works fine, except that it means that all requests from the commandline / programmatically / with a non-_javascript_-capable browser don't work anymore. [2] This includes uscan(1). [3]
So this means that we won't do any updates of Debian packages representing CPAN distributions anymore.
As for potential fixes/workarounds:
- Setting a different User-Agent doesn't change anything.
- Bas found a way to change debian/watch to use the MetaCPAN API, cf. [4]. In my POV, that's both technically brilliant and aesthetically difficult :)
In general I think that updating ~5000 d/watch files (and some tools) is not an attractive option …
- Hacking uscan to mangle metacpan.org URLs (or to work around the _javascript_ requirement from signalsciences in general) might be doable but that would have to go into stable and whatever as well.
- Using a redirector for uscan might work but probably also needs updating all d/watch files.
I guess talking to the MetaCPAN folks would be a reasonable next step. Is there anybody, maybe wih connections to them, willing to do this? I admit that I don't have the energy to put another task on my TODO list.
Or maybe someone else has other ideas …
Cheers,
gregor
[0]
https://github.com/metacpan/metacpan-web/commit/212a28303f761c181a4fcd94d8b17e70650ac1c2 [1]
https://blogs.perl.org/users/dean/2025/07/metacpan-running-really-well-thanks.html[2] try
wget -O-
https://metacpan.org/release/ack curl
https://metacpan.org/release/ack GET
https://metacpan.org/release/ack[3] uscan --report -vvv
in a soure package directory
[4]
https://salsa.debian.org/perl-team/modules/packages/libpdl-vectorvalued-perl/-/commit/fc92473