use Perl

I've been gone for a bit, having spent my first Christmas with family in 20 years. Needless to say, it's been a bit of an overwhelming experience. Just to give you an idea of how strange it was, my sister Lynne (who's two weeks younger than I am) introduced her father and mother to one another since they've never met — it's a looooooong story. I'm now desperately trying to catch up with everything.

My first order of business was to let the grant applicants know their status. We've only approved one grant this round, but we did have some fantastic applications. It was a tough choice. I'll announce the results later after we get some of the e-paperwork out of the way.

Also, while I was spending time with my family, I did a fair amount of coding in my downtime. I have a large update to TAPx::Parser which includes, amongst other things, a TAPx::Harness and a runtests utility analogous to prove. Note that at least two of those options are not only not available via prove and they'd be rather hard to add (not Andy's fault. The current Test::Builder/Test::Harness framework is just too hard to work with). Just to give you a little taste, here's part of the docs for it:

NAME

runtests - Run tests through a TAPx harness.

USAGE

  runtests [options] [files or directories]

OPTIONS

Boolean options

  -v,  --verbose     Print all test lines.
  -l,  --lib         Add 'lib' to the path for your tests.
  -b,  --blib        Add 'blib/lib' to the path for your tests.
  -s,  --shuffle     Run the tests in random order.
  -c,  --color       Color test output.  See TAPx::Harness::Color.
  -f,  --failures    Only show failed tests.
  -m,  --merge       Merge STDERR and STDOUT

Options which take arguments

  -h,  --harness     Define test harness to use.  See TAPx::Harness.

NOTES

If no files or directories are supplied, "runtests" looks for all files
matching the pattern "t/*.t".

Specifying the <--color> or "-c" switch is the same as:

  runtests --harness TAPx::Harness::Color

The "--merge" option forces error diagnostic output to be synched with
STDOUT to ensure that the appropriate diagnostics appear after the test
which fails.  This feature is highly experimental and should not be
relied upon.  See "TAPx::Parser::Source::Perl" for more information.

If any of that makes your socks roll up and down, let me know.