Maintainer's Notes on rt.cpan.org

If you are a CPAN author, this is for you. Otherwise it's still time to become one!

RT.cpan.org has a little known feature called Maintainer's Notes. Maintainers of a CPAN distribution can put a piece of HTML above the tickets list.

Hacking in progress in Lancaster

The Perl QA Hackathon 2013 started yesterday in Lancaster. About 30 people hacking to fix bugs in the Perl toolchain and all our tools we use daily to publish stuff on the CPAN. Thanks to all our sponsors that make this event possible and to all the benevolent hackers that came from all over the world.

Follow our news on the Twitter feed: @perlqah.

Profiling Dist::Zilla

Dist::Zilla is slooooowww!

This is in part because it uses Moose. In part because it has many features. In part because it uses App::Cmd that has a major design issue (it loads all command plugins on every run).

But this is also because most plugins are written without care for their compile time and run time cost especially when they are loaded but not used. For example the BeforeRelease plugins when you just run dzil test.

Despites this I'm using it every day at work (because it is powerful), but with much pain.

So here are some tips on how to contribute to improve that situation.

Perl in msysgit : call for help

The port of Git on Win32, msysgit, has Perl bundled with it. This means that most Git users on Windows have a perl installed somewhere. This is an important opportunity to bring developer tools written in Perl to a larger audience. My own github-keygen tool is one of them.

Unfortunately, that perl has some quirks:

  • this is an old 5.8.8, with a huge patch
  • it is built on msys, which a quite uncommon environment for Win32 perl developers (…

HTTPS-Everywhere rulesets for Perl sites

HTTPS-Everywhere is a Firefox and Chrome extension brought by the EFF to automatically use https:// URLs instead of http:// if the site supports that. Think about what happens when you type http://github.com instead of https://github.com/ in your address bar.

So I added rulesets for PAUSE, BitCard and MetaCPAN.