Dean

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

Recent Actions

• Commented on Is your account on blogs.perl.org registered with an @cpan.org email address?
  Oh this is good news. Maybe next we can move on from mailman lists and irc....
• Posted Installing Bit::Vector on Debian 13 (Trixie) to dean

  Whilst Bit::Vector is available as a Debian package in libbit-vector-perl, when installing it using cpanm the compile failed for me.

  The installation crashed during the make stage, throwing a specific compiler error regarding

• Commented on Is your account on blogs.perl.org registered with an @cpan.org email address?
  I dont but I am curious what the background on this is?...
• Commented on Signing CPAN Releases with SigStore
  This discussion seems healthy and there appears to be alot of alignment already....
• Commented on Signing CPAN Releases with SigStore
  The unfortunate license choice for Module::Signature made it challenging to use. No it's not "perl 5" as the metacpan page says, it is CC0 as per the pod, at least one of the pod subheadings anyway - very confusing. However,...
• Commented on AI as a Chance - Opinion
  AI coding is here and it's not going away. It is to coding what combine harvesters are to farming. A factory is perhaps a better metaphor - hand made cars simple cannot compete with automated production lines. So now that...
• Commented on AI Contributions to CPAN: The Copyright Question
  This is a good article and it is well written. About licensing. I have on this occasion and this occasion encouraged people to relicense their code to well known permission licenses. Some open source licenses have significant compliance burdens on...
• Commented on GitHub and the Perl License
  May i suggest, as i have before, that the best solution is to relicense to MIT...
• Posted Compiling Google::ProtocolBuffers::Dynamic on Debian Trixie to dean

  I found this sufficient of an obstacle that I wanted to post about it for future posterity.

  I was able to cpanm Google::ProtocolBuffers::Dynamic after installing these packages on Debian Trixie.

  • build-essential (unsurprisingly)
  • cmake
  • libprotobuf-de…
• 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...

Comment Threads

• Timothy Legge commented on Signing CPAN Releases with SigStore

  At present PAUSE has no way to validate that I am the timlegge@....com that uploaded those files.

  PAUSE does have my "private email" which happens to be the one that I used so it could verify that the signature is from that email identity but it does not have a concept of identity provider.

• Grinnz commented on Signing CPAN Releases with SigStore

  If PAUSE could provide (pardon the pun) an identity provider service that this could utilize, that seems like it would make a nice closed loop of trust. PAUSE mostly only gets significant overhauls at a PTS though :)

• Ranguard commented on Signing CPAN Releases with SigStore

  Nice!

• Aristotle commented on Is your account on blogs.perl.org registered with an @cpan.org email address?

  Good point, I’ve updated the post with a link to the relevant context.

• Aristotle commented on Is your account on blogs.perl.org registered with an @cpan.org email address?

  Yeah, we should all move to modern commercial platforms. It’s hard to see why we even bother with CPAN nowadays when GitHub is right there. PAUSE email notifications go to CPANAUTHORNAME@cpan.org by default, so it not’s even working that well any more. And CPAN RT cannot even send email notifications anywhere but CPANAUTHORNAME@cpan.org at all, and it was already old and decrepit even before this, so it should just be deleted.