use Perl

I've released Carp::Source. It exports a function, source_cluck(), that does pretty much the same as Carp's cluck()except it also displays the source code context of all call frames, with threelines before and after each call being shown, and the call being highlighted. Enjoy.

I forced the architecture to be x86_64 by setting it as an environment variable:

export ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64"

This seemed to have worked for compiling mod_perl2 and DBI but I'm still struggling with Apache2::Request.

It is with great pleasure that The Perl Foundation and Mozilla Foundation announce a major new Perl 6 Development Grant. The recipient of the grant is Patrick Michaud, the Perl 6 compiler pumpking and lead programmer of a Perl 6 implementation based on Parrot and on his own work on the Perl 6 compiler and grammar. The grant will provide Patrick with four months of support for this work beginning November 1, 2007. Patrick will receive US$15,000 over this time, with $10,000 of the funding coming from Mozilla Foundation and $5,000 from The Perl Foundation.

The goals for this development grant are:

1. To have a Perl 6 on Parrot implementation that supports commonly-used Perl 6 constructs;
2. Improvements to the Perl 6 test suite;
3. To substantially complete the Parrot Compiler Toolkit, including documentation;
4. Increased community participation in Perl 6 and Parrot development, including development efforts on other languages utilizing Parrot and the Parrot Compiler Toolkit.

In order to ensure the proper management and progress for this grant TPF asked Jesse Vincent to be the Grant Manager. Jesse has graciously accepted this volunteer position. Jesse is a noted Perl community member and he has worked as the Perl 6 project manager for the past several years. Additionally, he (through his company, Best Practical Solutions) has supported the Perl 6 effort through a series of microgrants.

Patrick Michaud and The Perl Foundation will provide grant progress updates and summaries at http://news.perlfoundation.org.

http://news.perlfoundation.org/2007/11/patrick_michaud_awarded_perl_6.html

At least on LinkedIn, for now. We just created a LinkedIn group for Perl Mongers. Enjoy and join the group!

The San Diego Perl Mongers group will be having their regularly scheduled meeting at 7:00pm on Monday, November 12, 2007. Not so regular, however, is what we'll be doing. We have a presentation this month! David Moore will be joining us to talk about the different Perl/C interfaces, SWIG and XS. It should be interesting, so come on out and join us.

We'll be meeting at in Qualcomm's building Q auditorium.

6455 Lusk Blvd.
San Diego, CA 92121

Google Map (This is not quite right. The building is on the west side of Pacific Center Blvd. It's the building with the colorful roof.)

I'm one or two test runs away from completing the image-generation elements of the new Perl::Dist implementation.

This means I will be able to do distribution releases in .zip form for people to test (they won't have the .exe or .msi installer).

While I continue onwards to finish the re-implementation of the .exe install generation, I'd like to get some feedback from people on any modules that they would like to come pre-installed with Strawberry Perl.

Up to this point, I've wanted to limit the extra modules in Strawberry to just toolchain modules, and create a separate "Chocolate Perl" that bundles a whole ton of extras.

But feedback from Strawberry users seems to show there's a preferred middle group, with some small set of modules bundled that are otherwise very difficult to install (Expat and libxml are the biggest two requested).

I'd add SQLite to that list, but unfortunately DBD::SQLite is currently broken on Win32 due to a forking (and thus failing) test.

What else would people like to come pre-installed with Strawberry, other than toolchain modules like PAR::Dist.

After re-implementing this by hand about a dozen times now, I've created a package to deal with it in a single method call. Win32::WebBrowser exports a single method, open_browser(), that pops open the default browser in a detached process and points it at a URL.

Who knows, maybe it'll make the Strawberry Perl dist...

We've just released Test::Harness 3.00. It's a complete rewrite of Test::Harness with a more modular architecture that should make it easier to write custom testing tools.

The list of accepted talks for the Perl Workshop in Israel is available on our web site.

I recently had a few spare tuits and ran out of books to read, so the Moose object system popped to the top of my stack.

Like many new and cool projects, features are accellerating away from documentation, and often what a new starter wants is a low-down, which isn't there (yet). Catalyst and DBIx::Class were each like this at one point in time.

To help myself and others I have created a PDF Moose Quick-Ref Card with most of the functions and syntactic sugar consructs of the system.

Thanks go to folks in the #moose IRC channel, and the Programming With Moose WikiBook written by EvanCarroll. The ref card will work best if you can print it 2-up on one A4 sheet, cut that in half, then laminate the two A5 parts back-to-back.

Comments and suggestions for the ref-card will be gratefully received :-)

Sending mail is too hard. You have to know what kind of machine you are on and what the sysadmins might have set up. It's even more of a pain if your code might run in a few places. That's why I've written Email::Send::Gmail so you can send email programmatically using a Gmail account. Simple but good.

ack, my replacement for grep for 95% of the times programmers use grep, just got released to CPAN with version 1.70.

At long last, you can now get contextual lines before and after matched lines, just like GNU grep's -A, -B and -C options. You can also match on a specific line number or range of line numbers with the new --line option. For example, if you want to see the first line of every Perl file in a tree, you'd just do ack --line=1 --perl. Thanks very much to Torsten Biix for putting both these features together for me.

Finally, Elliot Shank pointed out that one of my favorite features, the -1 option, was never documented. Now it is. The -1 option says "stop after the first match of any type." If you find yourself acking for lines, or searching for a specific file with ack -g and then having to Ctrl-C to stop the search process, just add a -1 and Ctrl-C no longer.

ack is available in the ack distribution on CPAN, or by installing the module App::Ack from the CPAN shell. You can also download the single-file version direct from Subversion and drop it right into your ~/bin directory.

The Perl 6 design team met on 31 October 2007. Larry, Allison, Jerry, Will, Jesse, and chromatic attended.

CPAN Testers Statistics

After successfully mapping 54 addresses from September up to mid-October, I sent out the six-month request to all outstanding addresses used so far this year. After only a short time I'd already received several emails from testers updating their details for me, mapping a further 14 addresses. It is notable that several new and current testers are now putting their names, or a least some form of reference in their addresses, that makes it very easy for my scripts to reference them, so thanks very much for that.

I've finally opened the Call For Participation for the Open Source Symposium taking place April 25-26, 2008. If anyone would like to submit a talk, please do so. I really hope to have Perl properly represented.

The Windy City Hackathon is Dec. 14-16 in downtown Chicago.

I've reserved and paid for 12 beds at the J.Ira & Nicki Harris Family Hostel, the Windy City Hackathon location. The hackation is free, but you if you want to stay onsite, you need to pay for your room soon to get one of the slots. It's a total of $115 for Thursday night through Sunday morning in hostel-style rooms. If you wait and have to get a hotel room, you'll pay more for that for just one night and still spend most of your time at the hostel. Pay for your room with a credit card through The Perl Review, or ask me about other ways to pay.

I've just upgraded my MBP to Leopard. Apple's version of tar has the annoying habit of generating extra files to represent Mac specific attributes. That's particularly annoying for CPAN authors because they tend to break your test suite and you can't easily see them without unpacking the archive on a non-Mac system. Grrr.

It used to be possible to disable this behaviour by setting the env var COPY_EXTENDED_ATTRIBUTES_DISABLE to some true value - but this seems to have stopped working in Leopard. As a result I've just released a broken version of Captcha::reCAPTCHA. Double Grrr.

strings /usr/bin/tar fails to reveal anything promising, /usr/bin/gnutar is just a hard link to /usr/bin/tar and I can't get the MacPorts gnutar to build so for now I've restored a copy of Tiger's tar from a backup and dumped it in ~/bin (which I have on my path). Phew.

Watch out Mac-based module authors - it's hard to detect that you have a broken archive without testing it on a non-Mac machine.

As previously reported progress on Test::Harness 3.00 ran aground temporarily while we worked out how to run our test suite on VMS. We're back on track now, running our smoke tests automatically on a VMS TestDrive account.

With help from Craig Berry and Michael Lemke I've put together a page on the Perl-QA Wiki that describes the process:

http://perl-qa.hexten.net/wiki/index.php/Testing_on_VMS

It includes a link to the script we use to remotely execute our test suite. If I've missed anything important or made any errors please feel free to dive in and fix them.

Leopard comes with Perl 5.8.8 with threads enabled.

Characteristics of this binary (from libperl):
  Compile-time options: MULTIPLICITY PERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT
                        PERL_MALLOC_WRAP USE_ITHREADS USE_LARGE_FILES
                        USE_PERLIO USE_REENTRANT_API

Which means that, occasionally, stuff like this happens:

make: *** No rule to make target `/System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/config.h', needed by `Makefile'.  Stop.

Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni filed a bug for Module::Install/YAML::Tiny complaining that Module::Install is preventing YAML::Tiny from being fully 5.004-compatible.

And to be honest, he's complete right in his fear and loathing.

Using Module::Install (or even Module::Build) is a complete philosophical clash with the entire concept of ::Tiny. OBVIOUSLY we should be using the oldest, most stable, most compatible build system of all, for modules which have practically no features and absolutely no complexities by design.

So as soon as I get a chance, I'm reverting the installers for all of the ::Tiny modules to plain vanilla ExtUtils::MakeMaker.

And my apologies to the beleaguered Sébastien.