How do I find an old Perl module on CPAN?

[David Filmer]

I am running old CGIs on a new box. I use the module
Convert::ASCII::String, which no longer appears on CPAN searches.

In the past, I was able to find an old module (Tools::SQL) because I
was able to determine the author's name (Kane) and found it on
backpan.perl.org. But this time, I have no knowledge of the module
except its name - I do not know the author's name (and have no readily
available means to find it). backpan seems to support only searches
by author name, not module name.

Thanks!

 

[brian d foy]

In the general case I would try asking (e-mail address removed).

In the general case, before you bother them, try BackPAN:
http://backpan.perl.org, which has almost every distribution
ever uploaded. As you note, Google is helpful too.

Once a
namespace has been registered on CPAN, it never gets unregistered,

That's not quite true. If you look the bottom of your Module Metadata
page, you'll see a "Lifecycle" field. One of the options is "Can be
removed from database".