Dean

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

Recent Actions

• Posted Manage the health of your CLI tools at scale to dean

  I wrote a follow up of my previous article on dev-to. It is titled Manage the health of your CLI…

• Commented on Shipping a Perl CLI as a single file with App::FatPacker
  I can only speculate on the requirements that caused you to go with it, but running stuff over latent NFS doesn't seem like a great approach to me. But yeah fatpacking would improve load times in that scenario, as would...
• Commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance
  Having some mechanism to determine downstream breakage would be a net win with our without coding agents. It would be even more helpful with an automated mechanism to communicate changes to downstream authors. As far as I can tell, other...
• Commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance
  I noticed your bot sending you pull requests and was meaning to ask some questions about it bit you've saved me the effort. This is very impressive and exactly what is needed. I noticed one such pull requested which got...
• Commented on Shipping a Perl CLI as a single file with App::FatPacker
  Somewhat tangentially, i started out with Net::Async::HTTP - but it was no fun to fatpack and everything blocked on 'get' anyway so there wasn't much value. LWP also allows us to use these modules which are a pure joy: LWP::ConsoleLogger...
• Posted Shipping a Perl CLI as a single file with App::FatPacker to dean
  self-contained artifact. Whether that means a statically linked binary, a container image, or a snap/flatpak, the benefits are the same -- dependency management is solved at build time, platform differences are absorbed, and upgr…
• Commented on Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) with Perl
  Update: I am pleased to see Protobuf has been reserved on the CPAN....
• Posted Help testing DBD::Oracle to dean

  A small group of volunteers continue to maintain the DBD::Oracle driver without any sponsorship or funding.

  Who have curated yet another dev release which has hit the CPAN in the form of v1.91_5 - probably the last dev r…

• Commented on Foswiki 2.1.11 is released
  ❤️ Foswiki...
• Commented on Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) with Perl
  Indeed i have done to the underlying upb package...
• Posted Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) with Perl to dean

  I'm hoping to reach anyone using Protocol Buffers in Perl, soliciting their experiences and best practices.

  A Googler is soliciting help on an official set of bindings just this year. Which is great!

• Posted Sydney February Meeting! 2026 to dean

  Sydney Perl continues regular meetings with our next in February

  Please join us on Tuesday 24th Feb 2026 at Organic Trader Pty Ltd.
  Unit 13/809-821 Botany Road Rosebery

  6:30pm to 9pm.

  Ch…

• Posted Taking the Win - Perl in the TIOBE Index to dean

  There has been much to say about Perl improving in TIOBE during 2025 and ending in the top 10 which is roughly where things were around 2016.

  Many things are working well in the Perl community and we should expect to be seeing th…

• Commented on Perl in a Monorepo
  That's a significant insight, thanks. Could you point to any other open source tools that have been useful?...
• Commented on Perl in a Monorepo
  That's a fascinating insight. The thought hadn't occurred that someone might dump everything in a single lib/ (although thinking back I have seen that before on a shared nfs which shared a similar function). Having come from an organization that...
• Posted Perl in a Monorepo to dean

  Without weighing in to the pros and cons of using a Monorepo approach to your organizations codebase, I am interested in hearing about tools and approaches that have been used with Perl.

  For example, I have found that ="https://gi…

• Commented on Design Pattern Factory
  BTW there is a book called "Perlish Patterns" by Phil Crow which predates your efforts (which are greatly appreciated). I mention this work as something that may be of value to contrast and or compliment it. I won't link to...
• 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

Comment Threads

• Todd Rinaldo commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  > In the next iteration of this, may I suggest doing development releases?
  > Let CPAN Testers chew on the code for a bit before you put it into production.

  The issue so far has not been my own module's code it's been downstream deps. CPAN Testers doesn't cover this and definitely doesn't point out incompatibilities with devel versions against downstream modules. So the question I keep asking when people bring this up is:

  How would this help?

• Todd Rinaldo commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  > just need to adjust your AGENTS.md to avoid annoying cliches (at least you didn't say "learnings" or "concrete")

  It's what I get for not being more pedantic with a French person's English pluralisms. :)

  Trust me I actually do correct these several times a week!

• Grinnz commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  I'm not sure where you got this idea. CPAN Testers covers whatever individual testers decide to cover, which certainly includes downstream deps of trial releases. But more importantly: how would it hurt?

• Tom Wyant commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  I don't know how development releases would help you. I do know that just because one of my modules passes all tests on my box does not mean it will pass everywhere. If the problem is truly only downstream failures, maybe development releases wouldn't help.

  But maybe what this means is that we need more testing infrastructure -- something analogous to "Blead Breaks CPAN," but for CPAN itself, not perl.

• Robert Rothenberg commented on 575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

  I have a lot of concerns about using LLMs.

  The sheer volume of code changes they can submit seems overwhelming. That's a lot to review, and it seems that bugs can slip through. I've seen some daft changes show up in codebases due to AI.

  There has also been some research in poisoning LLMs so that can insert security holes in code, not to mention years of badly-written/insecure code posted online that they have been trained on.

  There are also some serious legal and ethical concerns about using them:

  Do the PRs contain code snippets from other code with incompat…