Dean

• Website: www.facebook.com/groups/perlprogrammers/
• About: I blog about Perl. I am back in Sydney

Recent Actions

• Commented on Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) with Perl
  Update: I am pleased to see Protobuf has been reserved on the CPAN....
• Posted Help testing DBD::Oracle to dean

  A small group of volunteers continue to maintain the DBD::Oracle driver without any sponsorship or funding.

  Who have curated yet another dev release which has hit the CPAN in the form of v1.91_5 - probably the last dev r…

• Commented on Foswiki 2.1.11 is released
  ❤️ Foswiki...
• Commented on Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) with Perl
  Indeed i have done to the underlying upb package...
• Posted Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) with Perl to dean

  I'm hoping to reach anyone using Protocol Buffers in Perl, soliciting their experiences and best practices.

  A Googler is soliciting help on an official set of bindings just this year. Which is great!

• Posted Sydney February Meeting! 2026 to dean

  Sydney Perl continues regular meetings with our next in February

  Please join us on Tuesday 24th Feb 2026 at Organic Trader Pty Ltd.
  Unit 13/809-821 Botany Road Rosebery

  6:30pm to 9pm.

  Ch…

• Posted Taking the Win - Perl in the TIOBE Index to dean

  There has been much to say about Perl improving in TIOBE during 2025 and ending in the top 10 which is roughly where things were around 2016.

  Many things are working well in the Perl community and we should expect to be seeing th…

• Commented on Perl in a Monorepo
  That's a significant insight, thanks. Could you point to any other open source tools that have been useful?...
• Commented on Perl in a Monorepo
  That's a fascinating insight. The thought hadn't occurred that someone might dump everything in a single lib/ (although thinking back I have seen that before on a shared nfs which shared a similar function). Having come from an organization that...
• Posted Perl in a Monorepo to dean

  Without weighing in to the pros and cons of using a Monorepo approach to your organizations codebase, I am interested in hearing about tools and approaches that have been used with Perl.

  For example, I have found that ="https://gi…

• Commented on Design Pattern Factory
  BTW there is a book called "Perlish Patterns" by Phil Crow which predates your efforts (which are greatly appreciated). I mention this work as something that may be of value to contrast and or compliment it. I won't link to...
• Commented on Sydney August Meeting!
  Thanks for pointing out the typo. Lets pretend it was just MM-DD-YYYY date formats...
• Posted Sydney August Meeting! to dean

  Thanks again to Organic Trader for hosting and providing a venue!

  Meeting is as follows...

  Speaker:
  Stuart Cooper

  Time and Date:
  6:30-9pm
  Wednesday 20th August 2025…

• Commented on Is it still worth adding installation instructions to a distribution?
  I suspect it would be best to point to instructions for generic perl module installation, which could then provide various options (assuming you have author have decided to prescribe to them... which you likely have implicitly via MakeMaker or friends)....
• Commented on Remembering Matt Trout
  I met him twice at perl conferences. My experience wasn't noteworthy but at the same time I didn't make any attempt beyond asking some follow up questions from his talk. I admired that he claimed to run NetBSD on both...
• Posted MetaCPAN running really well. Thanks! to dean

  I don't know everyone who is involved in maintaining MetaCPAN and I don't know all the details of the performance related issues that have been an ongoing challenge (I believe they have been related to relentless bots?).

  In any case, this last week Meta…

• Posted DBD::Oracle v1.91_2 released to dean

  With help from the community a development release of DBD::Oracle has been released to the CPAN.

  This release includes a number of ="https://metacpan.org/release/ZARQUON/DBD-Oracle-1.91_2/cha…

• Commented on Resigning from the TPF and TPRF board
  Thank you for all your great work. You have been a credit to the board and the community....
• Posted Welcome new contributors with the first-timers-only tag to dean

  I invite everyone involved in foss Perl projects to invest some time in being inclusive by creating and marking a few open issues/bugs with the label first-timers-only. The first-timers-only label explicitly announces:

  I'm willing to hold your ha…

• Commented on This week in PSC (106) | 2023-05-05
  Please be cautious with phrases like "Installing modules securily". I believe that the goal is to be able to copy the tarball files via https. So whilst this is a very necessary step towards whatever "securily" is, it's not the...
• Posted Early May Perl Software Releases 2023 to dean

  This is not exhaustive at all and is based on github release notifications rather than MetaCPAN recent. If your perl project uses github releases please let me know so I subscribe to them. I also post them to

• Commented on The Perl Toolchain Summit is back in 2023!
  Why not post the sponsor prospectus publicly?...
• Commented on Reconsidering the licensing of Perl code
  My employers for the last 10+ years have had policies against AGPL, but most recently I have seen GPL moved from the "okay" list to the "must get approval" column. My current employer has the best license tracking I have...
• Posted Hours left to donate to The Perl and Raku Foundation in the US 2022 tax yer to dean

  There are still a few hours left to donate to The Perl Foundation in the US 2022 tax year. Please support the great work the foundation does to support Perl and Raku

  https://www.perlfoundation.org/donate.html

• Commented on An objective criteria for deprecating community platforms
  Thanks for the link Dragonflydigest https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2022/12/24/lazy-in-other-bsds-reading-for-end-of-2022/...
• Commented on Skeleton Week: Nopaste with mojopaste
  A few years on I have a few extra thoughts. Firstly, an internal pastebin for your company really is vital. Pasting from your work computer to a public pastebin is almost certainly a violation of employment non-disclosure agreement regardless of...
• Commented on An objective criteria for deprecating community platforms
  I discussed these key weaknesses in legacy platforms previously: https://blogs.perl.org/users/dean/2021/04/reimagining-perl5-porters-email-list-for-2021-and-beyond.html People are more than welcome to maintain systems which allow search engines to index the content. Reddit does that and so does Stackoverflow. No platforms where listed above. It's unfortunate...
• Posted An objective criteria for deprecating community platforms to dean

  Perl has been around for a couple of years longer than Python and Linux. Perl 5 was released in 1993, the same year as FreeBSD and NetBSD.

  In the 90's for Open Source projects the "community platforms" where Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists run on Listserv or Majordomo (Mailman didn't …

• Commented on Return of Kephra
  Where can we find Kephra ?...
• Commented on Frankfurter Perl Workshop 2022 - 6.11.2022
  Has any content from this even been posted online?...

Comment Threads

• Makoto Nozaki commented on Resigning from the TPF and TPRF board

  Hi Dean,
  It's truly an honor to receive such kind words from you. Thank you!

• brian d foy commented on Is it still worth adding installation instructions to a distribution?

  I think it's still worth it, and it's not causing problems to include it. I have this in my READMEs.

  You can install this module with a CPAN client, which will resolve
  and install the dependencies:
  
          % cpan Tie::Cycle
  
          % cpanm Tie::Cycle
  
  You can also install directly from the distribution directory, which
  
  will also install the dependencies:
  
          % cpan .
  
          % cpanm .
  
  You could install just this module manually:
  
          % perl Makefile.PL
  
          % make
  
          % make test
  
          % make in…
  

• 6031796 commented on Is it still worth adding installation instructions to a distribution?

  Honestly, I'd keep them. They take up very little space in the grand scheme of things and if having them helps prevent one person from just manually copying files around (which still happens with alarming frequency) then they have already been worth it.

• Aristotle commented on Is it still worth adding installation instructions to a distribution?

  I’ll take this opportunity to plug my Pod::Readme::Brief, which generates a README roughly along the lines that brian suggests. You can look at its own README for an example of its output.

• BooK commented on Perl in a Monorepo

  Yeah, you can basically map Bazel packages one-to-one with CPAN-like "distributions".

  The layout of a package/distribution setup could be something like:

  BUILD   # Bazel package definition
  lib/    # modules
  t/      # unit tests
  

  Each distribution is self-contained, and the Bazel BUILD file lists its dependencies.

  This is also where a slight impedance mismatch starts to become visible.

  On the one hand, since Bazel is a build tool, the graph of package dependencies must be a DAG (i.e. a tree).

  Perl, on the other hand, has no such cons…