Glossary: terminology and acronyms

There's a lot of jargon around CPAN and this challenge. Let us know any other terms you think should be included.

CPAN is the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. CPAN is a collection of releases, each of which is a tarball (or zip file) typically containing one or more modules. CPAN is also a set of mirror sites, each of which carries a clone of the master CPAN site. When you "get something from CPAN", you're getting it from one of the CPAN sites.

PAUSE is the Perl Authors Upload Server. If you want to release some of your code to CPAN, then you need a PAUSE id. By convention a PAUSE id is always shown in upper case. My PAUSE id is NEILB.

A PR is a pull request. More here.

RT is the bug tracker (RT = Request Tracker) that for a long time was the only way to track bugs for CPAN distributions. When you look at a module or distribution on MetaCPAN, you'll see an Issues link in the left hand sidebar. If there's a number next to it, that's the number of open issues, and clicking on the link will take you through to the distribution's issues. Each distribution can specify its preferred bug tracker. More and more dists set this to the github issues list for the relevant github repo. You can still find the dist in RT, but its page will refer you to github.