use Perl

Test::Distribution is probably the most widely used of all the Perl modules that I've developed. It's certainly the only one that I know of that has been mentioned in an O'Reilly book.

Over the last couple of years (mainly ever since my wife and I moved out of the parents and gained the responsibility of maintaining our own household) I haven't been able to give it the attention it needed. I'm hoping that will change over the next few years, but I've hoped that several times in the past too...

I'm interested in people's views on what I should do with T::D. Some ideas:

• Just pick off where I left off. Start going through the rt bugs and look to adding support for Module::Build in particular
• Deprecate the module in favour of _____
• Try and merge with the Kwailitie/CPANTS etc. tools out there which attack a similar domain but from a different angle
• Spend my time on a different project

  It'd be really good to hear from people that still use Test::Distribution and would appreciate me coming out from hibernation.

Since...

• a) Of the 4 or 5 Win32 Perl distribution variants we are making, most people will be using Strawberry Perl.
• b) 5.10.0 is code freezing.
• c) We can go to production releases once 5.10.0 arrives.

I think it's time for both some blatant hype and a website just for Strawberry (http://strawberryperl.com/). So after a whole 20 minutes of mucking around and no optimisation whatsoever, I give you http://strawberryperl.com/

(please note that the downlink link uses the search.cpan HTTP CPAN mirror multiplexer, so it will take around a day for the link to start working everywhere).

After a lot of neglect on my part, http://cpants.perl.org/ is now working again. Sort of...

There are still a few problems (mostly with Meta.YML stuff), and I have to start the analysis manually on my laptop (which means there won't be automatic updates in the next few weeks, but only when I have some hours of CPU to waste)

Andy Lester writes "The Perl Foundation is pleased to announce the election of Alberto Simões to the position of Grants Committee Chair. Alberto was elected by the Grants Committee members from a pool of four strong candidates.

Alberto is president of the Portuguese Association for Perl Programmers, the leader of Braga.pm and the co-chair of YAPC::EU 2005 in Braga, Portugal. Alberto is a Ph.D. student in Machine Translation (Natural Language Processing) at the University of Minho, in Braga.

Curtis "Ovid" Poe has held the position of Grants Committee Chair since autumn of 2005. The Perl Foundation would like to give Curtis our deepest thanks for an excellent tenure as Chair of the Grants Committee and for all his help in preparing the search and election of his successor. Curtis has also pledged his support to help Alberto get up to speed as the new Grants Committee Chair over the next few weeks."

I just announced the beginning of the code freeze for the release of perl 5.10.0.

Lately, I've been finding David Cantrell's brilliant CPAN Dependencies website easier and more useful than the CPAN Testers website itself.

The CPAN Dependencies summaries are just do darned concise, while the CPAN Testers pages for an author are much harder to read (but then the dozen or so authors with dozens of modules tend to see these sites become unworkable far earlier than others).

For the last few months I've been using a couple of Perl specific Google Co-op searches.

The Perl search pulls results from 72 assorted Perl related sites including CPAN and perldoc.perl.org. It tends to work for those questions that you're not even sure where to ask.

Perhaps more useful is the CPAN search which I find often outperforms search.cpan.org. In particular it finds 'one word' module names like CGI or FCGI both of which search.cpan.org currently overlooks.

If you have any suggestions for sites I've missed or other improvements give me a shout.

Following on from Devel::CheckOS I have been working with

David Golden on Devel::CheckLib. It's similar to Devel::CheckOS, in that it will let module authors specify dependencies which aren't just other perl modules - if they need, eg, libjpeg, then they can use this module in Makefile.PL / Build.PL to make it a pre-req, and if it's missing then the CPAN testers will SHUT UP ABOUT IT and not annoy the author.

I finished all of the Perl::Critic policies that I proposed for my Perl Foundation grant! I actually completed the work about three weeks ago, but I needed to fix some bugs in PPI to make my new policies work.

I know all of you out there are enjoying making us sweat by waiting til the last moment, but the last moment is approaching. If you haven't yet, check out our Call for Speakers, and submit your talk soon!

I've been a bit quiet for the past month or so, mostly because projects both at work and home have taken up a lot of my time. One of the home projects has involved creating some report documents in PDF. When first thinking about this, I was looking at PDF::API2, and various other PDF modules, but was struck at how much layout work is put into the code. I don't like having to mix the two, as if I have to change anything in the layout it means changing the code. Reading a recent article on perl.com only reaffirms that. If you're creating a special document, this might work for you, but it doesn't for me.

Thanks to Andrew Ford and wikibooks, I have been learning how to mix LaTeX with Template Toolkit.

It's looks like I've solved the Crypt::Rijndael problems thanks to a patch from djberg96. It looks like some systems had an integer overflow problem with:

0xff << 24

So djberg96 changed that to use an unsigned int by attaching the U to the end of the number. I think I used to know that.

0xffU << 24

Additionally, I cast some return values from the XS stuff to (UINT *) to ensure that everything treated them as unsigned ints.

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.4.17 "Two for Finching." Parrot (http://parrotcode.org/) is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 0.4.17 can be obtained via CPAN (soon), or follow the download instructions at http://parrotcode.org/source.html. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion or SVK on the source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

The Common Lisp backend for KindaPerl6 has been making a lot of progress since I last wrote about it. We now have working variables, subroutines, lexicals (and closures), methods and other nice stuff. The full report is on the pugs blog.

I replaced http://ppm.tcool.org/ website with Catalyst+DBIC based one. Now you can search for modules/distributions it (and some other repos) provides. It also shows when the registered repos are last updated, and you can track down the dependency links to know which version of which packages would be installed alongside. This is rather important as not all the repositories have the latest version, and because I'm not using PPM::Make, packages in my repo tend to have different dependencies (compare http://ppm.tcool.org/dist/Plagger/at/tcool and http://ppm.tcool.org/dist/Plagger/at/theoryx5 for example).

search.cpan.org has an RSS feed for recently uploaded modules but there's only one minor problem: the feed doesn't have rich metadata.

Daisuke Murase (aka typester on CPAN and IRC) created a site called CPAN Recent Changes a while ago and it's been really useful for people tracking activities on CPAN.

I'm helping David Cantrell with Devel::AssertLib -- particularly with Win32 portability.

I have a branch that passes tests on my Linux and Strawberry Perl platforms, and I've added code that I *think* should work with ActiveState and MSVC, but I don't have that platform set up anywhere.

I'd greatly appreciate if someone(s) would download the branch from my repository, try running tests and let me know what happens:

http://dagolden.googlecode.com/svn/shadow/Devel-AssertLib/branches/dagolden/

If it fails and you can patch it to work, that would be wonderful as well.

Thank you very much

-- dagolden

With my repository working again and PPI 1.200 release, the next project I hope to catch up on is Strawberry Perl. I think this has taken on particular importance now because of the Perl Survey results, which showed that about 50% of Perl users have used Windows in the last year, but only 5% of Perl users ONLY used Windows.

One of the implications of the work on Test::Harness 3.0 is that Test::Harness::Straps will no longer exist as part of Test::Harness. For new applications you are encouraged to use TAP::Harness / TAP::Parser. The awkwardness of Straps was one of the reasons to embark on a rewrite of Test::Harness and the new code should make it far easier to write ad-hoc testing applications.

That leaves the question of what should happen to Straps. As Schwern points out it will still work once you have installed Test::Harness 3.0 - but it would be orphaned: installed but unmaintained with no updates available. The solution might be to make an independent release of Test::Harness::Straps. There's a slight danger then that people would continue to use it for new code but the documentation would carry warnings about the inadvisability of that - and ultimately if someone finds it useful, why not?

Let me know what you think.

Now that some of us have added our Gravatars to CPAN I thought it'd be fun (and perhaps a little scary) to collect all the available mugshots in one place.

The Faces of CPAN

We're disappointingly white and male - but who knew how damn fine we'd look as a group? Somebody should organise a naked calendar photo shoot next. People would pay lots of money not to see that.