blogs.perl.org

Three of us again. Aristotle had limited time, Philippe and Graham stayed longer.

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.

I have detailed the process of building docker image for The Weekly Challenge website.
Please check out the post for more details:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/build-docker-image

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]

A comparative analysis of different approaches discussed in the post below.
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/read-large-file

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]

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

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

These are some answers to the Week 293, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on November 3, 2024, at 23:59). This blog post provides some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1:

You are given a list of dominoes, @dominoes.

Write a script to return the number of dominoes that are similar to any other domino.

$dominoes[i] = [a, b] and $dominoes[j] = [c, d] are same if either (a = c and b = d) or (a = d and b = c).

Example 1

Input: @dominoes = ([1, 3], [3, 1], [2, 4], [6, 8])
Output: 2

Similar Dominoes: $dominoes[0], $dominoes[1]

Example 2

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

We were joined by Leon Timmermans and Tim Legge to discuss plans for TLS support in core.

• We talked about our inadequate handling of point releases and especially security releases. In the past this was handled on individual initiative. We need to institutionalize at least some of this as actual process to keep things on the rails.
• We discussed with Leon and Tim what we want to do to have TLS support in core. Future support for underlying APIs other than OpenSSL is desirable. Net::SSLeay also has cruft that we would prefer to avoid in core.

[P5P posting of this summary]

I was one of the organisers of the London Perl and Raku Workshop 2024, which happened last weekend. I've written about my own personal experience of this conference over on my personal blog.

A longer blog post will follow, likely on my personal site (I'll try to avoid it sitting in my drafts folder for too long). In the meantime, thanks to all who attended, spoke, volunteered, helped, advertised, promoted, linked to, encouraged, and so on, this year's London Perl & Raku Workshop. I think it worked out.

Scarves. This year's surprise swag, a 20th anniversary scarf rather than the usual t-shirt. We sill have a few of these left and I'm happy to send you one if you cover the cost of postage and packaging (roughly 15.- CHF). Please email the organisers if you would like one. It wil be first come (emailed) first served. Any that remain I will probably take to GPW next year to give away.

Videos. I will be processing these over the next couple of weeks. Expect them to be available on YouTube sometime mid November.

Feedback. If you attended the workshop it will really help us if you fill in the feedback form. All questions are optional and it is anonymous. Approximately 120 people attended the workshop - if half of you can complete the form that would be smashing.

Next Year? We have no plans. Yet.

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

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

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

All three of us attended.

• 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.)

[P5P posting of this summary]