"I'm really tempted to fix toke.c:S_incline() instead. I don't think there will be much breakage, right?" -- Rafaël Garcia-Suarez, hiking in mountain boots where angels fear to tread.

Both Gabor and Herbert have been discussing what they see as desirable in an editor.

I think most of the specifics of what this tool should do or that tool should do are largely irrelevant, because as a user interface we're facing what is fundamentally an "Open Problem".

What we can do, however, is identify the underlying effects that we need to achieve in the creation of tools for wide audiences, and then refer back to effects when looking at individual features.

Qiang writes "just a quick announcement that PerlChina is going to host a Beijing Perl Workshop on Nov 08, 2008.

It is jointly organized with the postgresql china that means there will be some postgresql talks as well. We have also secured few sponsorships to fly Jesse Vincent and two other postgresql hackers to the workshop. The conference website is not ready yet (having problem finding someone from ACT to move our test ACT site into production). If you are planning a trip to beijing in the early November, send a email to conference[at]perlchina.org to register the workshop, or even better come give a talk(20,40 minutes or lighting talk)!"

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.6.4 "St. Vincent Amazon." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running dynamic languages.

Today, we're releasing RT 3.8.0, the first major upgrade to RT in about two years.  Over the past two years, we've been working hard to improve RT.  We're very proud of RT 3.8 and hope you'll find it a worthy upgrade.

rurban writes "cygwin perl has been updated to 5.10.0-5.
Installable via http://cygwin.com/setup.exe

Important Changes since the last perl-5.10.0-4:
    — fixed serious Win32CORE issue with 5.10.0-4. This was
        statically linked, but never initialized at run-time.
    — fixed failing .dll linkage in ExtUtils::LibUtils::Kid.
        Broke gtk2-perl
    — softlink all /usr/bin longver scripts to versionless links
    — added Term::ReadKey (lost with 5.10.0-4)
    — based on 5.10.x patchlevel 34065. This was easier than
        cherry picking the most important patches since the
        official 5.10 release.perl-5.10.0 cygwin notes:
—
This release is binary incompatible with the old 5.8 releases,
but compatible to all 5.10.x releases. That's why we named the mainperl DLL /bin/cygperl5_10.dll and not cygperl5_10_0.dll.

The Perl Foundation is looking at giving some grants ranging from $500 to $3000 in August 2008.

In the past, we've supported Adam Kennedy's PPI and Strawberry Perl, Nicholas Clark's work on Perl internals, Jouke Visser's pVoice, Chris Dolan on Perl::Critic and many others (just check http://www.perlfoundation.org/grants for more references).

You don't have to have a large, complex, or lengthy project. You don't even have to be a Perl master or guru. If you have a good idea and the means and ability to accomplish it, we want to hear from you!

Do you have something that could benefit the Perl community but just need that little extra help? Submit a grant proposal by July 31.

As a general rule, a properly formatted grant proposal is more likely to be approved if it meets the following criteria

• It has widespread benefit to the Perl community or a large segment of it.
• We have reasons to believe that you can accomplish your goals.
• We can afford it.

To submit a proposal see the guidelines at http://www.perlfoundation.org/how_to_write_a_proposal and TPF rules of operation at http://www.perlfoundation.org/rules_of_operation. Then send your proposal to tpf-proposals @ perl-foundation.org.

On August 1st, proposals will be made available publicly (on this blog) for public discussion, as it happened in the previous round. So, please make it clear in your proposal if it should not be public.

Note that accepted but not funded proposals in the previous round do not need to be re-submitted.

I am happy to announce the Second Russian Perl Workshop which is called "Far East Perl" and takes place on 13th of September in Vladivostok.

Official website was just launched: http://fe2008.perlrussia.ru/.

Vladivostok is a city in the far far Eastern part of Russia, and is close to Japan, Korea and China.
http://perlrussia.ru/img/fe2008-map.gif

Local organization forces of the workshop are Vladivostok.pm and CSmile company.

[Rakudo spec regression status: 75 files, 1080 passing tests]

Rakudo Perl is now passing over 1000 tests in the official test suite!

http://www.pmichaud.com/perl6/rakudo-tests-2008-06-27.png

For those who are interested, the history of test results is available in CSV format from http://svn.perl.org/parrot/trunk/languages/perl6/docs/spectest-progress.csv .

Thanks to Jonathan, Moritz, Auzon, bacek, particle, Coke, chromatic, and everyone else who is helping to make this happen!

This Week on perl5-porters - 14-20 June 2008

David Nicol: Does pushing all exceptions to @@ whenever $@ gets assigned to break anything?

Abigail: In theory, it could, as @@ is a "normal" array that can be used as such. But I doubt anything serious will break. I'd say anyone that uses a punctuation variable that currently has no special meaning does so at his/her own risk, and doesn't have the right to complain if it does get special meaning.

-- Abigail, suggesting that a little backwards compatibility breakage from time to time can be good for the soul.

The Pittsburgh Perl Mongers are hard at work planning this years Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. (We are also planing YAPC::NA 09 but more on that later. But go ahead and mark your calendars for June 22 through Wednesday, June 24, 2009). Mark your calendars this years PPW will be October 11th and 12th 2008.

At this year YAPC::NA I was surprised at how much was going on before and after YAPC. So if you plan on coming to PPW and would like to have a hack-a-thon or something before or after the official PPW event and would like some help planing that let us know and we will do what we can.

PPW09 will have more training, more fun, and more talks than every before but if you think we might be missing something send us a note about it and maybe we can make it happen. We can not make everyone's wishes come true but we would like to try.

If you want to keep up with PPW announcements we have an announce mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/ppw-announce/.

Also you can keep an eye on http://pghpw.org/.

If you want to contact the PPW organizers you can email us at ppw-cabal at googlegroups.com.

If you are interested being a sponsor you can contact us at sponsors at http://pghpw.org/.

This year we are going to be offering a speaker mentor program. This is a chance to have someone work with you to polish your talk from idea to delivery. If you are interested in being a mentor or being mentored please let us know.

If you have already have a talk proposal you can send it to us now at ppw-proposals at googlegroups.com.

This Week on perl5-porters - 7-13 June 2008

This morning, clkao pinged me and mentioned that he couldn't get perlbug to set the From: header when sending a bug report. I promised him I'd take a look.

I opened up perlbug determined to add one line and send a patch. Somehow, I never got around to adding the line CL asked for... -- Jesse Vincent, getting a finger caught in the machine.

On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 0.6.3 "Beautiful Parrot." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages.

Parrot 0.6.3 is available via CPAN (soon), or follow the download instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

We got over 20 nominations (I'd call that a success).

I am now compiling all the emails and information and afterwards the discussion and the voting will start.

It's not going to be an easy task, I can tell you that... There's lot of good stuff in those emails :-)

The Perl 6 design team met on 04 June 2008 by phone. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Jesse, and chromatic attended.