Alien::Base Perl Foundation Grant Report Month 2
After last month’s breakneck development pace, I knew this month wouldn’t be as gratifying, and indeed it turned into quite a slog.
This month involved lots of little bug fixes, posting dev releases to CPAN, then waiting for test results from CPANtesters. As a side note, there are a larger number of reports coming from Solaris and BSD than I would have expected. Sadly one of the bugs that still hasn’t been sorted out is this recurring Solaris bug when changing working directory. It would appear that I am going to have to find a Solaris box or VirtualBox appliance, since waiting for test results for every fix attempt would take far too long.
I do have some nice things to report. I have received help from fellow WindyCity.pm member David Mertens and new contributor JT Palmer this month, so thanks guys! Next I have just pushed a new dev release which (again) changes the mechanism of dynamic loading; this one more reliant on DynaLoader’s facilities rather than munging ENV variables. This seems to be more platform independent, or I should say, as platform independent as p5p has written into it. I have much faith in them! Preliminary results seem promising. David had been having problems with a candidate Alien:: module that he is writing and this release seems to have fixed it. I hope to see Darwin and Win32 start passing too (gasp).
With that said, I am still targeting more documentation and a basic testing framework before a 0.001 alpha release. Seems like I’m always saying this, but I hope this will be coming shortly.
Fork Alien::Base on Github and note that the 0.000_009 dev release is still contained in the dlopen branch. I will merge it once the tests seem to bear it out.
As I delve into the deeper Perl magic I like to share what I can.
Great work on one of the most important missing parts of CPAN, IMHO.
Yeah, waiting for CPANtesters’ reports isn’t very productive. Reini’s perlall tool seems like a good fit for this kind of problem, he supports vms there, check it out.
I should amend, I call it a Solaris bug, it does pop up on other platforms, but only occasionally (and of course not on my system). Solaris always hits it, so I can use that to debug unless I find some other way to replicate (which I’m sure will lead directly to the problem (circular logic—)).