Perl QA Hackathon 2013 in Lancaster - notes by Wendy (2)

Saturday 13 april 2013
The QA Hackathon is thundering further like a heavily loaded roadtrain. We are now with over 40 people (I have been at workshops with less people attending, and most of what they did was just sitting and listening). hard work being done.

Well, not all. This morning after the welcome words, we got out with a group of 10 people in 2 cars and went on a small tour to Lake Windermere and some other lakes in the Lake District. Saw some amazingly beautiful sights... panoramas... buildings... villages... It took us 4 hours but it was worth it.

After coming back, there was pizza. Not my fav lunch, but still tasty. I had to take my slices of pizza and go into the Lancaster Consensus meeting with 21 other people and talk about important changes to Perl. Mainly about PAUSE, metaspecs, the Module Registration System, abandoned CPAN modules, automating giving PAUSE IDs, expiration dates for PAUSE IDs, and deleting CPAN distributions that are older than 5 years. That took over 2 hours. Lots of discussions. I took notes and even joined in some discussions.

Now the next task. These 16 pages of notes have to be transcribed. Which is a lot of work. Wendy, work. Wendy, get to work. Now. Hmmm....

Comment from online: "deleting CPAN distributions that are older than 5 years" is a shockingly horrible idea. I hope it was rejected at the meeting.

Reaction: "the proposal was adapted. This was a proposal to get reactions on and many came."

Other comment from online: "If you'll excuse a little pedantry, it's not "Lake Windermere", it's just "Windermere" (a "mere" is a shallow lake)."

Reaction: "I know. Still, not many British know (I noticed yesterday) that "mere" is also an English word for lake, and for that matter, it is almost the same as the Dutch word for lake: "meer". We went to the Lake District to see several lakes and one of them was Windermere. Very pleasurable."


Continuation of the day...
Page 3 of 16 done. Now I have to go to the Thai restaurant. This is horrible, since now I have to eat, drink, be social, play Fluxx and more of this terrible stuff. How about the notes, Wendy?

And now it is the next morning. Still not further than page 3. Have to drive somebody back to the hotel and stuff.

It is busy again. Lots of people. Everybody just did the 1 minute standup. They told what they did sofar. I did not take notes, but it is already very impressive.

4 Comments

> Comment from online: "deleting CPAN distributions that are older than 5 years" is a shockingly horrible idea. I hope it was rejected at the meeting.

I do think it is not about deleting distributions, but about deleting uploads that aren't the latest version of a distribution, thus making CPAN mirrors more like mini cpan mirrors. :)

A couple of years ago we had a CPAN Spring Cleaning and were able to reduce the size of the CPAN mirror by several gigabytes. This makes us slightly nicer to our mirrors' disk requirements. It was completely voluntary and worked quite well.

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user-pic I blog about Perl.