blogs.perl.org

Only Philippe and Aristotle this time.

We spent most of our time on the PPC process, and started by merging Dave Cross’s PR for a static PPC web site. Many thanks to Dave once again.

We discussed revising the PPC process, and started by picking more specific names for the various statuses of a PPC, which we’ll soon apply to the existing PPCs.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Some end of year reminders for CPAN Authors:

Do all of your modules have up-to-date contact information? If not, please release new versions with an updated email address in the AUTHOR section.

(And while you're at it, why not add a security policy to your distribution, so that people know how and where to report a security issue with your module.)

If you have a cpan.org email alias, does it forward to the correct email address?

And most importantly, if you are taking time away from maintaining Perl modules, please add ADOPTME or NEEDHELP as co-maintainers to mark your modules as available.

Thanks, and best wishes for 2025.

A very usefull feature of git show command, I discovered last night.
Please check out the post for more details:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/git-show

Prioritisation of Panic

Let me start off by asking the folk on this platform one question. Imagine a scenario that you had lost something important with multiple potential negative consequences. For instance losing a bunch of keys including your car keys, your house keys, your changing room locker keys and a USB stick. What would be the greatest cause for alarm? I suspect that while there may be many possible answers aligned with each individual’s life priorities, the real men in this group know that the most feared is the reaction following the revelation to the wife. For while any calamitous occurrence may be approached objectively, with rationality, reflection and hopefully recovery, this particularly troublesome phase involves heightened emotions, reactivating Mrs Saif’s indelible memories of my many past failings. Objectivity, while desirable in principle, has to deal with such a tainted history.

Just Graham and Philippe this time.

• We talked a bit about PPC 0025 (Perl version), but didn’t say anything new
• Regarding PPC 0030 (new operators) vs PPC 0031 (flags on operators), we continue to think that flags on operators bring more confusion than value (PSC #168). Perl is an operator-rich language, so adding new operators when needed sounds right.
• As for the discussion on implicit stringification of references, we think that adding more runtime effects to strict doesn’t really fit. The issue would likely be better addressed with a new warning (and is very similar to the uninitialized warning when dealing with undef).

[P5P posting of this summary]

Do you want LPW to happen again in 2025? Then you need to make it happen. You need to start thinking about this now. After Lee's closing talk, which detailed how organisation of the 2024 workshop worked and effectively put out a call for organisers for the future, a small number of attendees hinted they would be able to help out in one way or another. For that we are grateful.

However there is no core organising team yet for 2025. Someone, ideally two or three people, need to step up and explicitly say "we are going to organise LPW 2025". If you need help around any of this then we (the 2024 organisers) can guide you. The TPRF have also said they would like to explore how to support LPW 2025 and welcome potential organisers to join the monthly community meeting to discuss this.

Failing that LPW will be going on an indefinite hiatus again.

Happy birthday Perl!

The Perl Community Conference is a hybrid in-person-and-online event held on December 18th from 10:30a-4:00p CST, Perl's 37th birthday, featuring talks from the world's top Perl programmers and community members. Topics include artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, web applications, chemometrics, genetics, data science, high performance computing, ethics, and much more!

We are happy to announce that CosmoShop supports the German Perl/Raku-Workshop.

CosmoShop is the largest pure Perl based shop system.

Since 1997, we have been implementing sophisticated and individual eCommerce projects in the B2B sector with our specially developed store software. We are the central point of contact for the entire spectrum.

Just Aristotle and Graham for our first meeting of the new year. Not much progress since the last one due to Christmas, New Year’s, sickness, and other personal circumstances. We discussed our framing of the version bump, the timeline for a decision, and the fact that constraints push us toward a dummy .0 third version component as the simplest way forward.

[P5P posting of this summary]

A gentle introduction to git bisect command for all git fans.
Please check out the post below:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/git-bisect

There is a “use locale” somewhere in the code you are running.

I skipped 2023 but in 2024 I'm actually doing two dev releases of Perl again. This time it is version 5.41.7.
And again, you can watch it live on Friday 20th of December on Twitch.

This week felt like a PSC reunion meeting. We extended invitations to join us for a discussion of the version change to a number of core contributors, and ended up joined by ex-PSC members Ricardo and Paul (Neil would have joined, but couldn’t make it).

There is skepticism but no strong opposition. The benefits are in some doubt, and resources to implement this will not come from core contributors. So we want to experiment on a branch to get a handle on feasibility and viability, which we hope will give us better data to evaluate the proposal and, we hope, allay any worries.

We also briefly discussed our intentions for the PPC process with Paul. We are thinking about an automatically generated status page on GitHub Pages.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Recreating the Future using Promise::ES6.
Please checkout this post for more information.

https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/promise-in-perl

SYNOPSIS

I have just released a trial version of PPI that includes the first shot at support for Perl signatures. After installing it, you can access this feature in the following ways.

For users of perlcritic and other PPI consumers:

• include use 5.035; or higher in your code
• include use feature 'signatures'; in your code
• include a known signatures-enable strictures modules from CPAN in your code, e.g. Mojolicious::Lite, Modern::Perl
• if you enable signatures via a custom strictures module, declare it via %ENV: PPI_CUSTOM_FEATURE_INCLUDES='{MyStrict=>{signatures=>1}}' perlcritic Work.pm

For consumers of PPI, in addition to the above:

• enable recognition of custom parsing feature modules via: PPI::Document->new( custom_feature_includes => ... )
• enable the custom parsing feature for the entire document via: PPI::Document->new( feature_mods => ... )
• enable complex parsing of calls to module includes via: PPI::Document->new( custom_feature_include_cb => ... )
• query enabled features via ::Element->presumed_features

In a similar way as signatures, the core try feature is also recognized.

TODO

The Perl Community Conference is a hybrid in-person-and-online event held on December 18th from 10:30a-4:30p CST. Perl's 37th birthday, featuring talks from the world's top Perl programmers and community members. Topics include artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, web applications, chemometrics, genetics, data science, high performance computing, ethics, and much more! Join our mailing list to receive the latest updates!

Sign Up:

https://www.meetup.com/austin-perl-mongers/events/304573306/

We have secured a location for anyone looking for a place to participate in person to be. At least 2 Conference talks will be given and streamed LIVE from this location.

See some of the many accomplishments of the Science Perl Committee in just the last year:

https://www.reddit.com/r/perlcommunity/comments/1gvtv7s/first_year_accomplishments_of_the_science_perl/

At the conclusion of this Conference, we will be announcing our exciting plans for Summer 2025 and future Issues of the Science Perl Journal. Full abstracts for current Issue are now available for free at the site.

Cheers,

Brett Estrade (OODLER)

Science Perl Committee Chairman

Another extended meeting, which everyone attended. Here’s a summary:

• We want to get actual implementation of TLS in core underway. Paul volunteered for some of it. We’ll email our plan to p5p, to get things started.
• We talked about undef-aware equality operators. While the flags idea is tempting, we don’t think that there are enough useful flags to go down this route (what’s the use of stacking flags, if you only have one). If equ and === are added to Perl, we think the negative versions (neu and !==) should be added as well.
• We had a quick version discussion. The document is almost ready.
• We want to poke the PPC implementors again, to make sure we can have some of them available in the next version of Perl.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Have you heard of CPAN module Scientist?
Please find below a gentle introduction.
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/scientist-in-perl

Someone wanting to make a social media site (such as a Mastodon server & web client for example) will want to allow its users to post URLs, for which previews will be shown in their posts.

These posts will be visited by a UserAgent, but there is the risk that a private IP (disguised as a FQDN hostname that resolves to it) will be in the URL's host, and that might cause security issues.

I could use LWP::ParanoidAgent, but then I'd have to fork a process to make the whole thing async, like a good Mojolicious site will be, and too many processes running can be a problem. Also I'd be missing on the many Roles that exist for Mojo::Useragent.

So I opened this issue on Mojolicious's github wishing for a solution.

Recordings of all talks from this year's London Perl & Raku Workshop are now available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxNdCz2kBhVlzbVFcjwY6GkQf4zBhvwFn.

The sound quality of the recordings is not fantastic. We had some sort of issue that I've tried to fix in post. However, the auto generated captions by YouTube tend to be pretty good these days, so enable those if you have any problems understanding the speaker.

I go into the details a bit more about this in a personal blog post about the event, and how much effort is involved in trying to create the recordings, amongst other things.

Thanks to this year's sponsors, without whom LPW would not have happened:

• Deriv
• CV-Library
• Geekuni
• Geizhals Preisvergleich
• Datensegler e.U.
• SpareRoom
• Oleeo
• PayProp
• Meterian