brian d foy

Saint Perl 6 started with its hack day instead of putting it at the end. I can summarize some of the proceeding, but some of the end-of-day reports were delivered in Russian. Someone else will have to fill in the blanks.

I mentioned my CPAN Testers from GitHub idea and some people looked into it. Miyagawa has a gitpan.pl gist that fakes out CPAN.pm with CPAN::Inject. That's interesting, but many of the tools, such as CPAN::Reporter, depend on the various CPAN clients. Miyagawa's cpanminus can install from GitHub, and there's Garu's App::cpanminus::reporter, but that fragilely depends on the output of cpanminus as it does its work. It's a simple matter of programming to fix that. From there, the group moved on to other things (which someone else will have to write about).

I mostly worked alone and at a feverish pace to make the PerlPowerTools.com website. I didn't really mean to do that, but I saw a gh-pages branch in the PerlPowerTools repo. That's from GitHub Pages, a way to host websites through a GitHub account. I must have pushed a button at some time to automatically create that.

GitHub Pages can use an orphaned branch that has no history. It's like having a separate repo in your repo. Strange but true.

I can also use my own domain name by creating a file named CNAME. Wow. So, I registered PerlPowerTools.com, set that up on Cloudflare, and created a single page website. It was almost too easy.

To go a step further, I moved some things around on the website to make room for translations. I had to adjust the GitHub pages templates to find the right files from the translation directories, but I figured that out quickly too. Once I had that set up, I tweeted that I was ready for translations. About an hour later, @shvgn had forked the repo, translated the page, and sent his first ever pull request. Now there's a Russian translation in time for my talk on it tomorrow!