cpan Archives

Creating a registry of environment variables

I want a registry of environment variables. If I see someone using one, I want to know what it does and what code or programs uses that. Or, given a program, what are all the variables that might affect it?

Rather than do the whole thing, I let myself do part of the first bit. I crawled all of my installed modules to pull out the keys used with %ENV. My solution (here's the gist) does some dumb matching then passes the result to PPI. I…

CPAN Cleaning Day 2457027: Changes and README

I spent another day of prosaic adjustments to my CPAN distributions. For quite awhile the chaos of the Changes and README files have bothered me, so I wanted to think about those. And, many of the files I scheduled for deletion disappeared from PAUSE today.

I'd like Changes to have structured information that a program can turn into a data structure (and query, such as "What version fixed GitHub issue #137?". We don't quite have that, but there is the start of a specification in CPAN::Changes::Spec a…

CPAN Testers from Github?

At the pre-Saint Perl 6 dinner, we were talking about ideas for the hack day. I mentioned something David Farrell and I had talked about a couple of weeks ago.

I'd love to kick off CPAN testers from Github. Instead of uploading a dev version to PAUSE, I'd commit to some special branch, or create a special tag, or something, then get the same results I get now.

I have no idea how this would work or how the CPAN Testers would find out about the new releases. Maybe there's a central point that polls Github repos and acts as th…

Let's delete 10,000 files from CPAN

This week, let's delete 10,000 (decimal) files from CPAN. Thanks to Ricardo, we're almost a tenth of the way there.

rik_spring_cleaning.png

We're a month into spring and some of the world just celebrated Earth Day, so it's time for the thousands of PAUSE authors to each delete one old distribution (which is three files in your …

Visualizing a CPAN install plan

At the patch -p1 Perl hackathon, I'm working on bits related to my idea for a new sort of CPAN client. One of the features I want is a graphical display of the work to do and the work being done.

Creating the data structure in Perl is easy. Start with a module, figure out it's distribution, then grab that META.{json|yml} to get dependencies (for now, with more discovery later). Put that stuff into a data structure.

But I …

Reverse installing CPAN, at the Polish Perl Workshop

My Polish Perl Workshop talk on taking an existing Perl installation and creating a CPAN-like repository that would create it.

CPAN {Spring|Autumn} cleaning time again

Get rid of your old distributions on CPAN! A couple of years ago, I asked CPAN authors to visit their delete files PAUSE page to "increase their Schwartz". Sadly, the use.Perl page has disappeared; the Schwartz Factor is the ratio of latest distros to the total size of CPAN. I named it after Randal Schwartz, who invented MiniCPAN.

Wendy noted that deleting distros was a topic at the recent Lancaster Q…

My Catincan funded cpan(1) fastest mirror enhancement

I've completed the cpan(1) fastest mirror enhancement I described in Perl in Catincan, an open source crowd funding proposal. I wanted to test this new crowd-funding system on something small. Everything worked out and "Perl" is the first project to have a fully funded feature implemented. There were some bumps because I was the first, but once I sent in my bank details, I had the money in a day. The code stuff is done, and once CPAN.pm releases a few things in my pull…

Mark your modules as adoptable if you don't want them

Signal that you'd like to pass on your modules by giving the virtual PAUSE user ADOPTME permissions. I've always been amazed at one of the least appreciated features of CPAN: people will step up to maintain or shepherd modules that aren't scratching their itch. It's a different sort of activity than the long-term or drive-by participation that most open source projects rely on. There are a group of people who maintain CPAN projects that they don't even use. There are a few that I handle that I've never used in a program.

I think we can improve on this wonderful but underrated social f…

Should my Perl release process be yours?

Steven asks "What is your release process". I could have buried my thoughts in the comments, but Dean Hampstead suggested it as a topic for the second edition of Mastering Perl. I started to respond there, but that got a little out of hand too. Whereas Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl are much more "do what I show you because you're new", Mastering Perl is much more "why do we do this?".

There are two opposi…

About brian d foy

user-pic I'm the author of Mastering Perl, and the co-author of Learning Perl (6th Edition), Intermediate Perl, Programming Perl (4th Edition) and Effective Perl Programming (2nd Edition).