What is the meaning of grey color for Perl distributions listed on metacpan.org?

Question

Lists of Perl distributions on metacpan.org use blue color for regular distributions and red for development releases (containing an underscore). But some are colored in grey, for reasons that I fail to understand, and I found no explanation on the site.

Answer 1

I suspect we're talking about pages that show a list of releases, such as the Recent page, that shows the most recent releases.

In this page, blue is the colour for links. It is used for most releases. Red is the colour for development or trial releases. Grey is the colour for a release that's not the current version. This happens when an author uploads multiple versions in quick succession, or when you go far back into the past, such as page 10 with 500 entries.

This screenshot illustrates it.

Note you can also guess that this is what's going on by looking at the source code of the page. Each of these three options has a class associated to it in the HTML.

<tr>
    <td class="river-gauge" sort="2">...</td>
    <td class="name dist-release status-latest maturity-released">Archive-BagIt-0.098</td>
    <td class="abstract">The main module to handle bags.</td>
    <td class="date relatize" sort="21 Feb 2025 08:25:59 UTC" title="21 Feb 2025 08:25:59 UTC">41 minutes ago</td>
</tr>
...
<tr>
    <td class="river-gauge" sort="11">...</td>
    <td class="name dist-release status-cpan maturity-developer">Finance-Quote-1.64_03</td>
    <td class="abstract">Get stock and mutual fund quotes from various exchanges</td>
    <td class="date relatize" sort="21 Feb 2025 02:46:10 UTC" title="21 Feb 2025 02:46:10 UTC">6 hours ago</td>
</tr>
...
<tr>
    <td class="river-gauge" sort="2">...</td>
    <td class="name dist-release status-cpan maturity-released">Archive-BagIt-0.097</td>
    <td class="abstract">The main module to handle bags.</td>
    <td class="date relatize" sort="20 Feb 2025 12:36:59 UTC" title="20 Feb 2025 12:36:59 UTC">20 hours ago</td>
</tr>

This is a shortened excerpt of the fAs you can see:

• status-latest and maturity-released for the first one, Archive-BagIt-0.098, which is blue
• status-cpan and maturity-developer for Finance-Quote-1.64_03, which is red
• status-cpan and maturity-released for Archive-BagIt-0.097, which is grey and is not the latest version

If you follow the links to each distribution above, you can also see on their individual pages how the heading with the breadcrumbs is either black (because it's not a link, so it's not blue), red or grey.