Tom Wyant

Recent Actions

• Commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance
  I don't know how development releases would help you. I do know that just because one of my modules passes all tests on my box does not mean it will pass everywhere. If the problem is truly only downstream failures,...
• Commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance
  In the next iteration of this, may I suggest doing development releases? Let CPAN Testers chew on the code for a bit before you put it into production. That way production code doesn't take a hit if there is an...
• Commented on GitHub and the Perl License
  Update: under CPAN Licensing Guidelines, The Perl and Raku Foundation recommends that dual-licensed packages put each license in a separate file in a LICENSES/ directory. Does this recommendation need to change?...
• Commented on GitHub and the Perl License
  So that's how you make it work. I have had two license files for several years because it made it easier to test for obsolete license text. But I use LICENSES/Artistic and LICENSES/Copying (which is the name of the file...
• Commented on Faster Readonly variables with Const::XS
  Note that Readonly appears to make use of Readonly::XS if that is available. Readonly::XS does not declare a Perl version dependency that I can see, but it is installed on my Perl 5.8.9....
• Commented on Wide character (U+XXXX) in substitution (s///)
  Nit-pick: Should it be binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(utf-8)';? I understood ':utf8' to be simply an assertion that the stream is UTF-8....
• Commented on “Let Maintainers Be Maintainers”
  True. I have heard programming compared to brain surgery. If that's true, maintenance programmers do brain surgery on American football quarterbacks during the Super Bowl, and it's the programmer's fault if the team loses....
• Commented on Response header name ' Content- type' contains invalid characters, after running a Perl_CGI script.
  Sometimes just explaining a problem you can't figure out enables you to figure it out. Strange, but true....
• Commented on ChatGPT for Perl Learning
  Well, if normalize all values to arrayref means what I think it does (i.e. $hashref1->{$item} = \@values;), that line in ChatGPT's code is buggy, and goes out of its way to be so. But given the notorious difficulty of transcoding...
• Commented on Ordering Your Tests
  P.S. The HARNESS_OPTIONS thing should work on whatever tool chain you use, because it acts directly on TAP::Harness....
• Commented on Ordering Your Tests
  I see your point. A test suite should succeed regardless of the order in which tests are run. Individual test files should be independent, I think of them as independent, and I will see about periodically testing in parallel. The...
• Posted Ordering Your Tests to Tom Wyant

  By default, the test actions of both ExtUtils::MakeMaker and Module::Build test

• Commented on Outstanding GitHub Items
  Your comment was not understood as discouragement, but a huge and welcome trove of additional information....
• Commented on ChatGPT suggests new keywords for Perl
  Verrrrrry interesting. I understand yield to call for something like an iterator. You can do this in Perl now, but I would be curious to know details. The most thought-provoking (to me at least) was dataclass, which I understand to...
• Commented on Outstanding GitHub Items
  About seven years ahead, in point of fact, not to mention in greater detail. Oh, well, the point bears repeating for those of us who are a bit slow....
• Posted Outstanding GitHub Items to Tom Wyant

  Recently I received a bump on a GitHub pull request. This surprised me, because I was unaware of anything outstanding. I was even more surprised when I discovered that the distribution in question also had two open issues, one dating back about three months.

  I have no idea why I was oblivi…

• Posted Annotated Test2::Tools Index to Tom Wyant

  I have very gradually been adopting Test2::V0 as a testing tool. I had a test file that performed a group of tests inside a for loop, and discovered there were circumstances where I wanted to skip an iteration.…

• Posted My Favorite Modules: PerlIO::via to Tom Wyant

  OK, I confess: PerlIO::via is not a module that I use every day. It allows you, easily, and with minimal code, to modify an I/O stream before it gets to the reader of the stream. or after the writer has written…

• Posted Regexp Delimiters to Tom Wyant

  Perl lets you use almost anything as a regular expression delimiter. It is usual to use punctuation of some sort, but characters that match /\w/ can be used provided there is white space between the operator and the delimiter: m X foo…

• Commented on PSA: Changing your b.p.o password is recommended
  Done. Thanks. Note that I had no luck using the "Edit Profile" page accessible from the initial log-in. I hit "Post", (which required a second login with the same password), and then had no trouble....
• Posted Making GitHub CI work with Perl 5.8. to Tom Wyant

  A while back. I got a pull request from Gabor Szabo adding a GitHub action to one of my distributions. I have been working with this, but have not (so far) blogged about it because, quite frankly, I am still not sure I know what I am doing.

  One of my personal desires was to test my distrib…

• Commented on New feature: HTTPS support
  Thanks! Not only that, but it displays correctly under Firefox. Well done!...
• Commented on On interpolating stuff into pattern matches
  Thank you for clarifying a point I, at least, found obscure. And for making this a top-level post, which it deserves to be....
• Posted Match Anything, Quickly -- Revision 1 to Tom Wyant

  O wad some Power the giftie gie us
  It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
  An' foolish notion: ...

  My previous blog post, Match Anything, Quickly, brou…

• Commented on CPM0 frl-plugin:perlscript: ERROR: 'times' trapped by operation mask at /usr/lib64/perl5/B.pm line 183.
  blogs.perl.org tends to be a blogging platform, not a help platform. You might try over on Perl Monks. You might get better response there if you post something more informative than "I get this error. Why?" The Perl Monks node...
• Commented on Match Anything, Quickly
  Boy, am I embarrassed. Thanks for picking up on the missing /smx. I did proofread, but obviously not enough....
• Posted Match Anything, Quickly to Tom Wyant

  Revision: that Cincinnati Perl Mongers found an error in the benchmark script used for this post. Match Anything Quickly - Revision 1 discusses their findings and links to a revised benchmark script.…

• Commented on Numeric Variable Names With Leading Zeroes
  Published Perl::Critic::Policy::Variables::ProhibitNumericNamesWithLeadingZero. I figured when the lead article of this week's Perl Weekly alludes to it I kind of have to....
• Commented on Numeric Variable Names With Leading Zeroes
  The policy is valid as far as I know. No false positives, at least. My bias toward non-publication (beyond GitHub) is because it does not address a current problem, and it appears to me that the single instance of this...
• Posted Numeric Variable Names With Leading Zeroes to Tom Wyant

  Over on the p5p mailing list, a user raised the issue that use of variable $00 is an error starting with Perl 5.32, and asked that this "regression" be fixed.

  I have alw…

Comment Threads

• Dean commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  I noticed your bot sending you pull requests and was meaning to ask some questions about it bit you've saved me the effort.

  This is very impressive and exactly what is needed. I noticed one such pull requested which got rid off a modules outdated indirect object syntax. My reaction was whatever a metaphorical fist pump looks like when you're just sitting at your computer and don't actually move.

  Absolutely, make AI do all that boring stuff! I have been having it take a crack at various outstanding requests on modules and merging good results. I have also simply pointed it at …

• Todd Rinaldo commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  > In the next iteration of this, may I suggest doing development releases?
  > Let CPAN Testers chew on the code for a bit before you put it into production.

  The issue so far has not been my own module's code it's been downstream deps. CPAN Testers doesn't cover this and definitely doesn't point out incompatibilities with devel versions against downstream modules. So the question I keep asking when people bring this up is:

  How would this help?

• Todd Rinaldo commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  > just need to adjust your AGENTS.md to avoid annoying cliches (at least you didn't say "learnings" or "concrete")

  It's what I get for not being more pedantic with a French person's English pluralisms. :)

  Trust me I actually do correct these several times a week!

• Grinnz commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  I'm not sure where you got this idea. CPAN Testers covers whatever individual testers decide to cover, which certainly includes downstream deps of trial releases. But more importantly: how would it hurt?

• Dean commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  Having some mechanism to determine downstream breakage would be a net win with our without coding agents.

  It would be even more helpful with an automated mechanism to communicate changes to downstream authors.

  As far as I can tell, other languages are now pinning everything and using bots to move the pins when tests pass. This has the major upside of each project itself opting-in to tracking upstream changes - not just being blasted with automated break notifications from some system they haven't decided to care about (or even know about).

  Pros and cons - but a proble…