Smylers

• About: Perl developer based in Leeds. Half-time for Webfusion, t'other half freelance, and a sideline in writing questions for BBC4's ‘Only Connect’. Previously worked for ‘The Register’ and run Perl training courses for Yahoo!, Microsoft, Sony, and the Nationwide building society among others. Keep being allowed back to speak at Yapc Europe conferences, despite a habit of presenting non-Perl topics.

Recent Actions

• Commented on What happened to Perl 7?
  Thank you for such a clear update. As somebody who only manages intermittently to follow what's happening with the Perl core, this is really useful, and explains several things I'd be wondering about....
• Commented on Perl 7, not quite getting better yet
  you run into weird issues where you have "use5 A::B" but "use7 A::C", and then A::B cannot upgrade to Perl 7, because all the callers still use "use5" to load it Not quite. use wouldn't mean ‘load and enforce v5...
• Commented on Perl 7, not quite getting better yet
  Moritz, I wondered who was going to bring that up! Yep, it needs some detail, but I think it could be made to work. As you say, under use v7 semantics, if use loads a module and lets it run...
• Commented on Perl 7, not quite getting better yet
  Thanks for writing that, Leon. Everything you say makes sense ... but I've been wanting for years to have a Perl release that has modern defaults, and there's been resistance to changing things in Perl 5. I'd be happy to...
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  Both good ideas. %C didn't exist when I wrote the above. On a laptop only used by me, I was using /tmp/ (it avoids need to know your username to put in the config), but for shared computers it isn't...
• Commented on Please Join Gittip
  Now signed up — thank you for prompting....
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  enable ForwardAgent just for specific hosts Good point. Thanks for suggesting this....
• Commented on A Metaobject Protocol for Core Perl 5 (translated from Russian)
  Thank you for doing this: it's an interesting and informative read, and your translation skills are excellent....
• Commented on local::lib and File::Spec
  Personally I don't like to use 'lib' or 'local::lib' in my application scripts as I find they lead to unnecessary structural binding between your application and the directory structure. That's fine. There are plenty of circumstances where I wouldn't do...
• Posted local::lib and File::Spec to Smylers

  local::lib is a great way of providing a contained set of Cpan modules for an application. But it can be awkward if you wish to use it to provide an updated File::Spec.

  I wished to use Path::Tiny

• Commented on YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev, week minus 32. First results
  Thanks, Andrew....
• Commented on YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev, week minus 32. First results
  Thanks for all your work so far on the conference. Are you planning on there being a partner's programme, as there have been at some other Yapc Europes? We're trying to work out whether my spouse and our baby (born...
• Commented on cpantimes
  Thanks. That sounds really nifty. I shall give it a go shortly. If Test::Reporter and Test::Reporter::Transport::Metabase are required, why not mark them as prereqs in App::cpantimes, so they get installed automatically?...
• Commented on YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev, week minus 42. Food
  I've liked all the conference-provided lunches at previous Yapc Europes. If you can find a way of providing lunch, that'd be fantastic. But I also didn't mind in Belfast and Vienna having to go and find lunch elsewhere. Chatting in...
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  That of course works. However it does mean that the Vim instance is remote, which may be less convenient or responsive than running Vim on your local computer in some circumstances....
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  Thanks for the tip....
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  Thanks. Sorry, I haven't really used SFTP (I generally use SCP or rsync), so I'm not in a position to explain anything about it....
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  Thanks. I shall look at Socat the next time I'm trying to do something along those lines. What are the advantages of Socat in the Corkscrew case? It seems that Socat is very general purpose, which is obviously is fantastic...
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  Hi Alexy. Yes, I should mention how to keep remote commands running even if the connection drops. If that's the only feature you want then dtach may be better than Screen: it's a much simpler program which just provides that,...
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  Hi Aristotle. Thanks for all those suggestions. I shall incorporate them in the next revision. Sshuttle seemers nicer for port forwarding/tunnelling too, especially with the -H option for automatically setting up hostnames....
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  Thanks for that. That new -W option looks really handy. I'll also investigate those speed options....
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  Thanks for pointing that out. Looks like I fixed the typo when you mentioned it, but didn't thank you....
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  Hi rhesa. If you look in my acknowledgements section you'll see I already linked to Aaron's article, and used it as a source. (Also, Aaron was my keyboard monkey during the presentation.) I didn't mention that use of autossh because...
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  Hi er0k. I did cover setting up port forwarding with LocalForward. It looks to me like -L is the same thing, just specified on the command line rather than in the config file. Or is there some other tunelling capability...
• Commented on SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers
  Thanks for that. I'd recently learnt about ControlPersist but hadn't realized it was so new....
• Posted SSH Can Do That? Productivity Tips for Working with Remote Servers to Smylers

  SSH has many features which are helpful when working regularly with files on remote servers; together they can give a vast increase in productivity over the bare use of SSH. If you regularly use SSH, it’s worth spending a little time learning about these and configuring your environment to make…

Comment Threads

• Leon Timmermans commented on Perl 7, not quite getting better yet

  Being a former bioinformatician myself, I can only concur it should work that way; but that's not how academic computing works today and it's unlikely that it will work that way tomorrow.

• moritz commented on Perl 7, not quite getting better yet

  Smylers, another nugget to consider: Raku's "use DBI:from;" only work because Raku and Perl 5 have different library search paths (and methods, but that's secondary).

  If you plan to use the same search paths for mixed Perl 5 + 7 libraries, then the information about which language to use has to be in the module, not in the caller.

  Otherwise you run into weird issues where you have "use5 A::B" but "use7 A::C", and then A::B cannot upgrade to Perl 7, because all the callers still use "use5" to load it (whatever the syntax turns out to be). Also, you spread the knowledg…

• Leon Timmermans commented on Perl 7, not quite getting better yet

  No apologies needed, but taking things to p5p may be a good idea indeed.

• tnish commented on Perl 7, not quite getting better yet

  Can we just have a /usr/bin/perl-ng (for 'next gen', or any other cheesy suffix we can think of)? It doesn't take over /usr/bin/perl, we won't end up with multiple perl8, perl9, etc... And it still has "perl" in it. /usr/bin/perl-ng will be 7 and beyond, /usr/bin/perl will be 5.x. Distros can ship a perl 7+, and a perl 5.x. It will be annoying to remember adding -ng to perldoc, cpan, and a few others, but, seems like something we can get used to (I'd just use shell aliases or something).

• George Magklaras commented on Perl 7, not quite getting better yet

  Nice article, I see most of your points. For the purposes of accuracy, however, you might like to correct what you say about Python3 and the Linux distros. Fedora (since Fedora 32 which is the latest stable) has switched to Python3 by default (and yes, this has upset many dev folk that were still relying on Python2). Gentoo (I think) has a compilable option to switch to Python3 and OpenMandriva has also ditched Python2. So, things are happening there.