Jan Dubois

• Website: jandubois.com
• About: Perl developer at ActiveState

Recent Actions

• Commented on DBD::mysql 4.019 and 4.020 are broken on Win32, here's how to downgrade
  I've applied the suggested fixes for the 4.020 version to the distroprefs on the PPM build servers and forced a regeneration of all Windows PPM packages for DBD-mysql-4.020. They should be available on the PPM repo within an hour or...
• Commented on Syntax police?
  If you really wanted to remove all ambiguity then you should have suggested Object::->new. ☺ Writing Object->new will be parsed as Object()->new if an Object function has been declared by the time this code is compiled....
• Commented on DateTime and Excel difference
  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214326...
• Commented on Perl and Parsing 5: Rewind
  FORTRAN statements were not limited to 80 characters; you could use continuation lines by putting any character except a space or '0' in column 6 of a new card to continue the statement from the previous card. There were compiler...
• Posted Perl Five is Alive to Jan Dubois

  Perl 5 core development was in a downward spiral for a couple of years. Releases happened less and less frequently, the number of contributors dropped and the general outlook was getting worse and worse. For the Perl 5.12 release I wrote a post on the ActiveState blog

Comment Threads

• Sawyer X commented on Syntax police?

  I am not the person who reported the issue, it was a co-worker. I agree that a patch (even for a single word change) would make the intent more evident.

  Clearly, if making such a suggestion was done rudely, I could understand a rude reply. However, I read the ticket (whose number I don't know) and it was written politely.

  I think common courtesy was in order.

• Sawyer X commented on Syntax police?

  I wish it was a matter of "if you would have supplied a patch, I wouldn't be a jerk", but it wasn't the case. Perhaps I'm just being negative here.

  Thanks for the link and suggestion!

• educated_foo commented on Syntax police?

  I agree that the submitter deserved a polite response. The attitude that "you aren't paying me for this code, so I can be a jerk to you" is one of the things I enjoy the least about Free Software.

  Still, I'm not very enthusiastic to apply coding style patches to things I maintain, much less to their documentation. I know Perl programmers are obsessed with style -- "TIMTOWTDI, so let's argue about them!" -- but it just seems like there are much better uses for people's time, like, say, finding and fixing actual bugs and adding features.

• Mithaldu commented on DBD::mysql 4.019 and 4.020 are broken on Win32, here's how to downgrade

  Jan, thanks a lot. I just installed that and errors now cause proper crashes. I've edited the post to reflect this. :)

  Rob, you can also take this as confirmation that the fix works. :D

• Conrad Halling commented on DBD::mysql 4.019 and 4.020 are broken on Win32, here's how to downgrade

  Thanks for posting about this problem. I was perplexed by this, too, but now I've been able to solve it thanks to your help.