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).
Adding a SECURITY or SECURITY.md file to your Perl distributions will let people know:
How to contact the maintainers if they find a security issue with your software
What software will be supported for security issues
The contact point is very important for modules that have been around for a long time and have had several authors over the years. When there is a long list of maintainers, it's not clear who to contact.
You don't want people reporting security vulnerabilities in public on the RT or GitHub issues for your project, nor do you want a post on IRC, Reddit or social media about it.
Otherwise, a single email address is acceptable. An alias that forwards to all of the maintainers or at the very least, a single maintainer who has agreed to that role will work.
I know, thinking about where to put what in a code file sounds lame to most artisan hero's that fly by intuition, but I find it actually helpful. Here my article about it on dev.to and you can tell its written with Perl in mind. I just wanted to publish outside to reach more people and maybe even bring some in.
Having reached a certain level of proficiency with Mojolicious and Vue.js, I made the decision to dedicate some of my free time every week to develop "cool and somewhat useful" (according to some) open-source web apps in Perl.
The goal is to practice and learn, and maybe also help make Perl a bit more popular.
My first such project is Gandalf Links, a link-aggregator website (inspired by pinboard.in) that's pretty much complete and can be installed and run very easily with Docker.
At the front page's footer you can find a link to the source code. A full list of current and future features can be found here.
If interested to contribute in ANY way (ideas, know-how, coding) please do get in touch with me via e-mail, through the form that's on gandalf.gr, or maybe use the project's issue tracker. I've done almost all I can on this project, now I'm looking for other people's expertise.
I'd also be looking for ideas on what other self-hosted web app to work on next (with you if you're interested).
For the last meeting of the year we were all present again.
We have requested further input regarding our plan for TLS in core.
We picked the ball back up that we dropped regarding point releases. They should be coming soon.
We went over our findings so far regarding Perl 42. It looks like Perl versions will have to continue to be written with three components, so we will be stuck with a fixed .0 at the end. It’s slightly annoying, but we can live with it. We strategized about how to get more real-world data about feasibility, and discussed the possibility of releasing a perl-41.8 tarball alongside the regularly scheduled perl-5.41.8.
We are delighted to announce the new release, which includes 57 significant bug fixes compared to the previous 2.1.8 version. This update addresses a range of important issues and enhances the overall stability and performance.
See entire the post to learn about our future plans, in perpetuity.
The very first Perl Community Conference was a tremendous success thanks to everyone of you authors and speakers. Many thanks to PCC Co-Organizer Will "The Chill" Braswell, our friends at the Diogenes Hackerspace (in Austin, Texas), and all the participants both online and in person! We'll be following up soon about posting the videos. The next stage will be editing and publishing Issue #2 of the Science Perl Journal. The schedule from the Winter'24 PCC should be a clue about some of its contents. We have discussed offering a "Letters to the Editor" section to address feedback from friends and foes alike. More on this will be announced in future posts.
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.
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.
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!
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.
We discussed the version 42 work on the psc/ppc0025 branch. We have an initial proof of concept that is almost good enough to test against CPAN in order to assess whether the plan is actually feasible and proceed from there. We discussed the timeline for this.
We reviewed our plan for TLS in core. Some questions came up based on the conversation on the p5p thread and we need specific next steps now that Craig has provided a patch for the first one. We hashed out next steps to keep this moving.
We briefly discussed the Random::Simple suggestion and decided we won’t address it at this time. (The inclusion of cryptography libraries in core will probably change the situation here in the foreseeable future.)
There is a “use locale” somewhere in the code you are running.
**Update:** This is specifically in reference to warning about wide characters *“in substitution”*. See also [the follow-up entry](/users/aristotle/2025/03/once-more-subst-widechar-warning.html).
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.
