Dean

• Website: www.facebook.com/groups/perlprogrammers/
• About: I blog about Perl. I am now in California

Recent Actions

• Commented on Sydney August Meeting!
  Thanks for pointing out the typo. Lets pretend it was just MM-DD-YYYY date formats...
• Posted Sydney August Meeting! to dean

  Thanks again to Organic Trader for hosting and providing a venue!

  Meeting is as follows...

  Speaker:
  Stuart Cooper

  Time and Date:
  6:30-9pm
  Wednesday 20th August 2025…

• Commented on Is it still worth adding installation instructions to a distribution?
  I suspect it would be best to point to instructions for generic perl module installation, which could then provide various options (assuming you have author have decided to prescribe to them... which you likely have implicitly via MakeMaker or friends)....
• Commented on Remembering Matt Trout
  I met him twice at perl conferences. My experience wasn't noteworthy but at the same time I didn't make any attempt beyond asking some follow up questions from his talk. I admired that he claimed to run NetBSD on both...
• Posted MetaCPAN running really well. Thanks! to dean

  I don't know everyone who is involved in maintaining MetaCPAN and I don't know all the details of the performance related issues that have been an ongoing challenge (I believe they have been related to relentless bots?).

  In any case, this last week Meta…

• Posted DBD::Oracle v1.91_2 released to dean

  With help from the community a development release of DBD::Oracle has been released to the CPAN.

  This release includes a number of ="https://metacpan.org/release/ZARQUON/DBD-Oracle-1.91_2/cha…

• Commented on Resigning from the TPF and TPRF board
  Thank you for all your great work. You have been a credit to the board and the community....
• Posted Welcome new contributors with the first-timers-only tag to dean

  I invite everyone involved in foss Perl projects to invest some time in being inclusive by creating and marking a few open issues/bugs with the label first-timers-only. The first-timers-only label explicitly announces:

  I'm willing to hold your ha…

• Commented on This week in PSC (106) | 2023-05-05
  Please be cautious with phrases like "Installing modules securily". I believe that the goal is to be able to copy the tarball files via https. So whilst this is a very necessary step towards whatever "securily" is, it's not the...
• Posted Early May Perl Software Releases 2023 to dean

  This is not exhaustive at all and is based on github release notifications rather than MetaCPAN recent. If your perl project uses github releases please let me know so I subscribe to them. I also post them to

• Commented on The Perl Toolchain Summit is back in 2023!
  Why not post the sponsor prospectus publicly?...
• Commented on Reconsidering the licensing of Perl code
  My employers for the last 10+ years have had policies against AGPL, but most recently I have seen GPL moved from the "okay" list to the "must get approval" column. My current employer has the best license tracking I have...
• Posted Hours left to donate to The Perl and Raku Foundation in the US 2022 tax yer to dean

  There are still a few hours left to donate to The Perl Foundation in the US 2022 tax year. Please support the great work the foundation does to support Perl and Raku

  https://www.perlfoundation.org/donate.html

• Commented on An objective criteria for deprecating community platforms
  Thanks for the link Dragonflydigest https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2022/12/24/lazy-in-other-bsds-reading-for-end-of-2022/...
• Commented on Skeleton Week: Nopaste with mojopaste
  A few years on I have a few extra thoughts. Firstly, an internal pastebin for your company really is vital. Pasting from your work computer to a public pastebin is almost certainly a violation of employment non-disclosure agreement regardless of...
• Commented on An objective criteria for deprecating community platforms
  I discussed these key weaknesses in legacy platforms previously: https://blogs.perl.org/users/dean/2021/04/reimagining-perl5-porters-email-list-for-2021-and-beyond.html People are more than welcome to maintain systems which allow search engines to index the content. Reddit does that and so does Stackoverflow. No platforms where listed above. It's unfortunate...
• Posted An objective criteria for deprecating community platforms to dean

  Perl has been around for a couple of years longer than Python and Linux. Perl 5 was released in 1993, the same year as FreeBSD and NetBSD.

  In the 90's for Open Source projects the "community platforms" where Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists run on Listserv or Majordomo (Mailman didn't …

• Commented on Return of Kephra
  Where can we find Kephra ?...
• Commented on Frankfurter Perl Workshop 2022 - 6.11.2022
  Has any content from this even been posted online?...
• Posted Buy a Perl 5.36 mug and support The Perl Foundation to dean

  Mugs celebrating Perl 5.36 are now available at The Perl Store with all proceeds going to The Perl Foundation

  ="40…

• Commented on TPF launches merch store for Perl 5
  TPF doesnt own a camel logo, it only owns the Onion logo and as of the last few weeks the Camelia logo for Raku. https://dev.to/thibaultduponchelle/the-perl-complex-topic-of-logos-3161 https://neilb.org/2020/12/04/perl-and-camels.html https://www.perlfoundation.org/trademarks.html The Camel image on O'Reilly books is owned by them and they have...
• Commented on TPF launches merch store for Perl 5
  It is inspired by but not a derivative work of the perl 5 raptor logo https://github.com/kraih/perl-raptor...
• Commented on TPF launches merch store for Perl 5
  There is an Onion on the back...
• Posted TPF launches merch store for Perl 5 to dean

  TPF has launched an online store with Perl merchandise (swag) celebrating the Perl 5.36 release. The marketing committee plan to do a custom celebratory collection for each release of Perl with revenue from each sale goes to TPF's…

• Commented on London Perl Workshop: Gold Sponsor cPanel
  Folks might also want to check out https://www.facebook.com/LondonPerlWorkshop...
• Commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license
  The assertion that "It isn't worth the (mostly unpaid) time" ignores the reasoning for an author writing and releasing the software in the first place. If the author releases the software hoping that supporting it will generate business (consulting, supporting,...
• Commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license
  I would like to see the perl interpreter modernize it's license. I think the legal committee should embark upon that herculean task. Regarding company policies though. It is common for companies to have a list of permitted licenses whilst also...
• Posted Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license to dean

  Following from my previous post, I am now actively encouraging everyone to switch licenses to MIT/

• Posted Ideas from TPRC2022: Bug/Task/Issue independent interface and a cli tool to dean

  We have a Database Independent Interface aka DBI and a Unified Cache Handling Interface aka CHI which both provide a generalized interface to similar backend services. Similarly we have

• Posted Ideas from TPRC2022: Tools to help refactor large mature code bases to dean

  Every Perl gig I have ever had, and from most of the conversations I had at this years Perl and Raku Conference, was working on a large code based that is serving the business and it's customers very well such that the business is profitable (i.e. a mature code base).

  This is an enviable …

Comment Threads

• Mike B commented on An objective criteria for deprecating community platforms

  Fun fact: public-inbox is written in Perl!

• Makoto Nozaki commented on Resigning from the TPF and TPRF board

  Hi Dean,
  It's truly an honor to receive such kind words from you. Thank you!

• brian d foy commented on Is it still worth adding installation instructions to a distribution?

  I think it's still worth it, and it's not causing problems to include it. I have this in my READMEs.

  You can install this module with a CPAN client, which will resolve
  and install the dependencies:
  
          % cpan Tie::Cycle
  
          % cpanm Tie::Cycle
  
  You can also install directly from the distribution directory, which
  
  will also install the dependencies:
  
          % cpan .
  
          % cpanm .
  
  You could install just this module manually:
  
          % perl Makefile.PL
  
          % make
  
          % make test
  
          % make in…
  

• 6031796 commented on Is it still worth adding installation instructions to a distribution?

  Honestly, I'd keep them. They take up very little space in the grand scheme of things and if having them helps prevent one person from just manually copying files around (which still happens with alarming frequency) then they have already been worth it.

• Aristotle commented on Is it still worth adding installation instructions to a distribution?

  I’ll take this opportunity to plug my Pod::Readme::Brief, which generates a README roughly along the lines that brian suggests. You can look at its own README for an example of its output.