blogs.perl.org

All three of us attended for some more issue triage. We accepted some assorted small fixes and CPAN dual-life module updates. The release blocker list remains empty.

[P5P posting of this summary]

tl;dr

Choose a bug that has a reproducing case from the list of open issues. Get the Perl source from GitHub, and put the reproducing case into a test file that we have designed for the purpose, and submit a pull request to GitHub for it. That's it.

The test is marked as expected to fail. Having this test in place helps us in several ways. One is that sometimes having to write a test is the straw that leads a developer to think it's just too much trouble to tackle this. Another is that, not all that infrequently, a change made for some other reason fixes one of these bugs, and we don't know it. But having this test would cause us to get notified that the bug is now fixed. It might even be that your work would show that the bug is already fixed.

Sometimes, when you're trying to debug encoding issues in Perl code, it is useful to quickly get an idea of what code points Perl thinks are in your string. The straightforward approach of say $string (or print $string) isn't a good way to look at an unknown string: The results depend on what encoding layers (if any) are set on STDOUT and how your terminal renders the resulting bytes. In some cases, "\xe2\x82\xac" (a three-character string, UTF-8 bytes) may look identical to "\x{20ac}" (a one-character string, Unicode text) when printed, for example. (And some control characters are invisible or can clear (parts of) the screen or reposition the cursor, etc.)

Data::Dumper isn't great, either: For one thing, you have to load it first and second, a naive use Data::Dumper; print Dumper($string) can still dump non-printable control characters on your terminal. You have to remember to set $Data::Dumper::Useqq = 1 first, which is a hassle (and takes another line of code).

I am preparing a new version of SQL::Abstract::More, aimed principally at solving several long-standing bugs when param ‘quote_char’ is non-empty (i.e when the user wants to generate SQL of shape like "SELECT `Foo`.`col1`, … FROM `Foo` etc.").
While working on this I need some input from users, because the situation is a bit complicated:

This meeting took place at the Perl Toolchain Summit 2026. All three of us met in person in Vienna and reviewed our release blocker status. Things are in the clear: no new blockers have come in since last meeting, and the previously identified ones are already resolved, with a single exception, namely the workflow for EOL notices in release announcements. Conveniently, Philippe, who just released 5.43.10, is also in attendance in Vienna, and has provided concrete feedback, so this is being addressed.

[P5P posting of this summary]

On March 17th, I installed a bot called koan on my personal Claude account. It's designed to monitor your four-hour usage limits, maintain a queue of "missions," and efficiently use your credits — even while you're sleeping.

Three weeks later, I had reviewed and merged 575 pull requests across 20 CPAN repositories, cut 58 releases across 17 of them, and caught memory leaks, security holes, and long-standing bugs that nobody had gotten around to fixing in years.

Some people think that means I let an AI commit unchecked code to critical Perl infrastructure. I want to explain what actually happened.

The Numbers

Here's what those three weeks produced:

Repository	PRs Merged	Releases
XML-Parser	95	8
IPC-Run	68	3
YAML-Syck	64	7
Net-Jabber-Bot	38	3
Net-ACME2	38	1
Net-Ident	33	5
Crypt-RIPEMD160	33	4
IO-Stty	30	4
Razor2-Client-Agent	27	2
Tree-MultiNode	24	2
IO-Tty	22	7
Business-UPS	20	2
Test-MockFile	17	2
Safe-Hole	17	3
Tie-DBI	15	1
Regexp-Parser	11	3
Sys-Mmap	9	1
Template2	6	—
Crypt-OpenSSL-RSA	4	—
CDB_File	4	—
Total	575	58

A few days ago, when we announced pperl's native module strategy on Reddit, someone asked about PDL support. We replied: "PDL will be supported." — to which u/fuzzmonkey35 responded: "We will live in glorious times when this happens."

Well. It happened.

We (as in: we and our AIs) reimplemented PDL (the Perl Data Language) from scratch in Rust — not a binding, not an FFI wrapper, but a ground-up reimplementation of the core engine. 15 data types, N-dimensional arrays, broadcasting, operator overloading, reductions, linear algebra, transcendental math — all in pure Rust, integrated as a native module into our pperl next-gen Perl5 platform.

use PDL;
my $a = pdl([1, 2, 3]);
my $b = pdl([10, 20, 30]);
say $a + $b;           # [11 22 33]
say ($a * $b)->sum;    # 140
say sin(pdl([0, 3.14159/2, 3.14159]));

45 tests, all green. Same Perl syntax. No XS. No C. No libpdl.

Modern software distribution has converged on a simple idea: ship a self-contained artifact. Whether that means a statically linked binary, a container image, or a snap/flatpak, the benefits are the same -- dependency management is solved at build time, platform differences are absorbed, and upgrades and rollbacks reduce to swapping a single file.

Perl's App::FatPacker applies the same principle to Perl scripts. It bundles every pure-Perl dependency into a single executable file. No cpanm, no local::lib, no Makefile on the target -- just copy the file and run it. The technique is well-established -- cpm (the CPAN installer we use in the build) is itself distributed as a fatpacked binary.

The distribution pipeline looks like this:

 Code repo --> CI --> fatpack --> deploy --> laptops / jumpboxes / servers
                      |
                single file,
                no dependencies

All three of us attended this long meeting consisting entirely of dealing with release blockers.

Continuing the dev.to series about beautiful Perl features, here are the recent articles (March 2026) :

• two-sided constructs, in list or in scalar context
• reusable subregexes
• "heredocs", multi-line strings embedded in source code

We took PetaMem's 13-year-old Lingua::* number conversion modules - dormant since 2013 with 17 languages - and brought them back to life. The suite now covers 61 languages across 7 writing systems (Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Devanagari, Armenian, Hebrew, CJK), including all 24 EU official languages plus Latin, Hindi, Yiddish, Mongolian, Uyghur, and more.

New in this release: cross-language numeral arithmetic with overloaded operators, ordinal support for 14 languages, capabilities introspection, and a Galois-field-based transitive test that walks the entire number space across all languages - 5000 steps, zero failures.

my $a = Lingua::Word2Num->new("zwanzig");      # German 20
my $b = Lingua::Word2Num->new("šestnáct");     # Czech 16
say ($a + $b)->as('fr');    # trente-six
say ($a + $b)->as('la');    # triginta sex

Everything on CPAN: cpanm Task::Lingua::PetaMem

If you’ve ever tried to run Perl code in a Java environment, you know the drill. Rewrite everything in Java (expensive, risky), or maintain two separate runtimes with all the deployment headaches.

PerlOnJava offers a third path: compile your Perl to JVM bytecode and run it anywhere Java runs. I’ve been working on Perl-to-JVM compilation, on and off, for longer than I’d like to admit. The latest push has been getting the ecosystem tooling right — and jcpan is the result.

Why This Matters

Some scenarios where this pays off:

Legacy integration. You have 50,000 lines of battle-tested Perl that process reports, transform data, or implement business logic. Rewriting it is a multi-year project with uncertain ROI. With PerlOnJava, you can deploy it as a JAR alongside your Java services.

JDBC database access. Perl’s DBI works with PerlOnJava’s JDBC backend. Connect to PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, or any database with a JDBC driver — no DBD compilation required, no driver version mismatches.

We were all present.

• We noted that core team membership votes are concluding on this day.
• We are waiting for voting to conclude before we kick off the discussion about an LLM policy.
• Release blocker triage continues. We are now fully caught up and marked a few more issues as blockers – all of them minor.
• We unmarked several issues as blockers and marked #23131 as such instead, because it was the root cause for them all. We then spent a long time deliberating what to do about it and debating approaches. We have not reached a conclusion yet and will be keeping an eye on it.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Finally - GTC 2.0, an all in one color library, is released ! This post will not be rehash (of) the (very) fine manual, but give you a sense what you can achieve with this software and why it is better than any other lib of that sort on CPAN. If you like to look under the hood of GTC, please read my last post.

Cross-posted from my blog

Last week, the Perl community came together for the 28th German Perl Workshop. This year, it was held at the Heilandskirche in Berlin Moabit. Excitingly, we had the nave for the presentations.

While the name is still German Perl Workshop, we now draw attendees from all over the globe. Presenters came from India, the US and various European countries. Maybe it is time to announce it as a more international conference again.

Available now from my Wiki Haven: Perl.Wiki.html V 1.42 & the JSTree version.

Also, I've uploaded to CPAN 2 modules:

1: CPAN::MetaCurator V 1.13

2: CPAN::MetaPackager V 1.00

Q & A:

1: What is the relationship between these 2 modules?
CPAN::MetaPackager's scripts/build.db.sh inputs
a recent version of the Perl file 02packages.details.txt,
and outputs an SQLite file called cpan.metapackager.sqlite (15Mb).
The latter ships with the module.

Future versions of this module will use the differences between the db
and newer versions of 02packages.details.txt to do the usual thing of
add/change/delete entries in cpan.metapackager.sqlite.

2: CPAN::MetaCurator's scripts/build.db.sh inputs
an JSON export from Perl.Wiki.html called tiddlers.json,
and outputs an SQLite file called cpan.metacurator.sqlite (15Mb).
The latter ships with the module.

Then scripts/export.tree.sh outputs a file called cpan.metacurator.tree.html.
This latter file is a JSTree version of Perl.Wiki.html, as mentioned above.

Note: By setting the env var INCLUDE_PACKAGES to 1 before you run export.tree.sh
the code will read the cpan.metapackager.sqlite table 'packages' and that changes
the output tree a bit, since the code then knows the names of modules released
to CPAN.

All three of us attended.

• We discussed policy questions that were turned up by the recent submission of some LLM-generated PRs. We need to hold conversation about this among the Core team. No contributions of this kind will be accepted while the discussion is still ongoing.

• We finally had a good chunk of time to spend on release blocker triage. We made quick progress, working through half our list and closing some issues in the process. We newly marked 4 issues as blockers.

[P5P posting of this summary]

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 release before a new version.

It has grown to be quite large so will probably be released as 1.95 or something to give it some distance from the last release. For that same reason I am hoping for anyone using DBD::Oracle in their stack to help us test it out.

Given the nature of Oracle it is very challenging to exhaustively test it, despite having quite a respectable set of unit tests. There are several current supported OS and architectures, and supported client and server versions, on top of Perl versions. Plus all the historical OS and architectures (and client and server and Perl versions) which are still running in production. Support for which is as I mentioned entirely up to volunteers and folks sending in fixes or enhancements.

On Jan 10th I had said in a post here, that perlmodules.net 's update (to use the new metacpan API) would take 1-2 weeks.

It took 1-2 months. (two in fact)

Now it's up again.

Sorry.

Huge congrats goes to Olaf A. for fixing my code.

Bye.

Note to perlmodules.net's users: Since you must have gotten a ton of emails from the website today regarding all the CPAN module releases that have occurred in the past 2 months, you are advised to check also your spam folder, since some of the emails might have ended there by your mail provider (it might have misinterpreted the deluge of incoming mails as spam). Please move them from the Spam folder to your inbox if you can, to prevent perlmodules.net from being blacklisted as a spammer (not 100% sure that's how blacklisting works, but anyway). Thanks.

Foswiki 2.1.11 is now available to be downloaded . This release came earlier than expected due to the severe security issues found in previous versions, as detailed in CVE-2026-2861. Thanks goes to Jan Seebens of Telekom Germany for finding the initial issue. While investigating the vulnerability, a few more were found that followed similar patterns in the cpde. Please note that some long-deprecated endpoints have been removed in order to reduce the vulnerable surface area. See the release notes for additional information.