Paul Johnson

My first day at the Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS) was largely spent coding, or dealing with pull requests, tickets, and releasing. The second day had far less of that sort of stuff, and a lot more of the sort of stuff that it's much harder to do away from the summit.

But it started off with a new pull request from Todd Rinaldo resurrecting a closed RT ticket. There is a whole class of problems Devel::Cover has to deal with which stem from the program being exercised changing the environment as it runs. The most obvious, perhaps, is changing directory, which is also something I looked at again yesterday. But this time it has to do with dropping permissions during the run. Todd and I had a discussion about it and, with the principles in place we'll deal with the technical matters in the coming days.

Then I had a productive discussion with Leo and Olaf regarding cpancover. With a bus number of somewhat less than one, we want to make cpancover.com more resilient. As a first step, the coverage data will simply be backed up to the metacpan infrastructure, meaning that in the event of hardware failure, or a mistaken rm -r, we can get ourselves back up again with the historical data.

We also discussed how we might be able to link metacpan and cpancover more closely, and I look forward to making progress in that area.

Then I spent some time reviewing the way in which the cpancover server is set up, and improving and documenting the process, with the idea that it should be fairly simple for anyone to be able to reprovision the server, or set up a new one.

I should note here that the cpancover server is generously provided by Bytemark. I also have a personal server there and they provide an excellent service.

After dinner, Leo and Lee helped me through the process of setting up metacpan locally, using vagrant and virtualbox. The process was painless due to the fine work they had done in automating it.

I also managed to process a few odd tickets here and there during the day and do other bits and bobs. All in all, it was the type of day that is only really possible at an event such as this, so thanks again to all the sponsors for making it possible: Booking.com, ActiveState, cPanel, FastMail, MaxMind, Perl Careers, MongoDB, SureVoIP, Campus Explorer, Bytemark, CAPSiDE, Charlie Gonzalez, Elastic, OpusVL, Perl Services, Procura, Oetiker+Partner.