Is there an 'official' CPAN specification document?

Question

Is there a authoritative and/or de-facto document detail how CPAN works, in enough detail that anyone could use it to rebuild CPAN from scratch without relying on oral-tradition and hearsay? Something documenting the directory structure, files that are supposed to be in a distribution, how version numbers really work, who can upload what and what exactly gets listed on the search.CPAN.org website, etc?

Answer 1

CPAN is nothing more than a mirrored file repository. Files are uploaded using PAUSE. About PAUSE answers most if not all of your questions.

You also mentioned search.cpan.org, but that's not part of CPAN. It's just one of many tools that accesses CPAN. Web site https://metacpan.org/ and command line tools cpan and cpanm are others.