Robert Rothenberg

• About: I was born on the Moon but kidnapped by astronauts and raised in the suburbs of Grumman. Eventually, I drifted along the Gulf Stream to Northern Europe.

Recent Actions

• Posted Ideas for the CPAN Meta v3 Specification to Robert Rothenberg

  At the 2026 Perl Toolchain Summit

  Why does the…

• 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...
• Posted Is it still worth adding installation instructions to a distribution? to Robert Rothenberg

  I have decided to write a successor to Pod::Readme that works as a Dist::Zilla plugin that plays well with Pod::Weaver.

  The idea for Pod:…

• Posted Testing distributions for potentially malicious Unicode to Robert Rothenberg

  I was inspired by Daniel Stenberg's recent article to write Test::MixedScripts, which tests Perl source code and other text files …

• Posted Add a security policy to your distributions to Robert Rothenberg

  Adding a SECURITY or SECURITY.md file to your Perl distributions will let people know:

  1. How to contact the maintainers if they find a security issue with your software
  2. What software will be supported for secur…
• Posted Please keep your information up-to-date to Robert Rothenberg

  Some end of year reminders for CPAN Authors:

  Do all of your modules have up-to-date contact information? If not, please release new versions with an updated email address in the AUTHOR section.

  (And while you're at it, why not add a ="https://security.metacpan.org/docs/guide…

• Commented on Idle Thoughts on Old Perl Versions for New Distributions
  > I wonder if it would be worthwhile for Perl to provide prebuilt binaries/packages of old Perl versions for current OSes Have you tried perlbrew?...
• Commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license
  The result would be that whilst your Perl interpreter is approved as part of your distribution, any modules that you want to pull from the CPAN would need approval. Or you might find that perl modules from the distribution...
• Commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license
  What problems have company lawyers had with the Artistic license? I've never run into this before, even at a previous employer where lawyers had the developers document every open source library or package used (including every CPAN module)....
• Commented on Addressing CPAN vulnerabilities related to checksums
  PAUSE signatures means that you trust that this is what was uploaded to PAUSE. But it's possible that a malicious person stole an author's credentials to upload something. Author signatures means that you trust that the author has approved this...
• Commented on Addressing CPAN vulnerabilities related to checksums
  A related aside: it would be nice to have CPAN authors register GnuPG keys with PAUSE, and an option to require their distributions be signed by their keys. Any change to an author's keys or uploads that aren't signed could...
• Commented on Addressing CPAN vulnerabilities related to checksums
  If a malicious person managed to get write access to the filesystem of a trusted mirror, then the PAUSE-signed CHECKSUMS add a safety check to ensure that the files were not tampered with....
• Posted Lexical readonly state variables with PerlX::Let to Robert Rothenberg

  I’ve released a new module PerlX::Let that adds a new “let” keyword so that you can do the following:

  let $x = 1,
       $y = "string" {
  
    if ( ($a->($y} - $x) > ($b->{$y} + $x) )
    {
    …

• Commented on Skeleton Week: Perl plugin for collectd
  Thanks for the link, that's interesting. But collectd has a support statsd plugin, and there are several Perl modules for sending metrics to statsd....
• Commented on Promoting Perl
  Andrew's point about API support is a good one. I'd like to add that while it's great to have "killer apps" written in Perl that are widely used, most companies won't care whether they are written in Perl. Their developers...
• Commented on Promoting Perl
  Are you promoting Perl, or pecific projects written in Perl? These are not the same thing. Who are you promoting Perl to? 1. Software Developers? 2. Management? I don't think (1) is difficult, as long as they have a reason...
• Posted Adding a ROADMAP section to the POD to Robert Rothenberg

  I've like to propose adding a ROADMAP section to module documentation.

  It would be a *short* summary of planned changes for future versions, noting what features would be removed or changed, or upcoming new features that will be added.

  More detailed roadmaps should be put in a sepa…

• Posted Graphics::ColorNames changes to Robert Rothenberg

  I have been making a lot of changes to Graphics::ColorNames lately. The module has gone too long without any maintenance, and suffered from feature bloat.

  Some notable changes that are already on CPAN:

  • A switch t…
• Commented on Type::Const released
  I would have thought something like has things => ( is => 'const', isa => BagOfWind, ); It should be fairly easy to write something automatically modifies the type and adds a coercion....
• Commented on Type::Const released
  I've updated it in v0.3.0 so that there is a single Const type that takes an optional parameter, e.g. Const[ArrayRef[Int]] I have removed the ConstArrayRef and ConstHashref types as well....
• Posted Type::Const released to Robert Rothenberg

  I've created an experimental Type::Tiny library called Type::Const that coerces ArrayRefs and HashRefs into constants using Const::Fast.

  Why?

  When you have read-only attributes in Moo(se) classes:

  ="prettyp…

• Commented on File::Slurp is broken and wrong
  it's not particularly relevant to slurping as the handle won't be shared between threads. It doesn't matter if the filehandle is shared. Just calling binmode will lead to a segfault....
• Commented on File::Slurp is broken and wrong
  I believe that the default encoding using by File::Slurp is because of a Perl bug with threads: https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=41121...
• Posted Pod::Readme can now be used with Dist::Zilla to Robert Rothenberg

  I've recently released a new version of Pod::Readme with hooks to work with Dist::Zilla.

  I also worked with Fayland 林 so that

• Commented on Scratching an itch - interpolable HTTP Status constants
  Actually, scratch that last reply. I misread it. Yes, you can use %hash = ( HTTP_OK() => ... ) or ${\ HTTP_I_AM_A_TEAPOT } but the code is a bit ugly. Admittedly, this module does add extra dependencies (although some like...
• Commented on Scratching an itch - interpolable HTTP Status constants
  @bor Yes, there's a simplified way of defining HTTP constants that way discussed in http://blog.nu42.com/2014/11/interpolable-http-status-code-another.html. But there's no compile-time checking of typos. If you type $HTTP{BSD_REQUEST}, you won't get an error and may miss a subtle bug. (Note that "BSD"...
• Posted Scratching an itch - interpolable HTTP Status constants to Robert Rothenberg

  When working on larger web applications, I prefer to use HTTP::Status to provide human-readable constant names in the code. This is especially helpful for anything other than the common 200, 404 or 500 status codes.

  But the constants exp…

• Posted Pod::Readme v1.0.2 released to Robert Rothenberg

  I released a new version of Pod::Readme yesterday. It's a module for "Intelligently generate a README file from POD" by using POD =begin/=end and =for commands to control what parts of a module's POD are included/excluded in the…

• Commented on A pre-release of Pod::Readme is available on CPAN
  @leon I am in the process of changing it from Moose to Moo. As for v5.10, I prefer using some of the features of v5.10 to simplify the code. If I get enough feedback from module authors asking for support...
• Commented on Rewriting Pod::Readme
  A pre-release has been uploaded to CPAN. See the announcement....

Comment Threads

• Randal L. Schwartz commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license

  Given that both Artistic 1 and Artistic 2 are clearly OSI-approved licenses, I don't see what the benefit is to relicense anything. Can someone explain this to me in simple terms?

• Randal L. Schwartz commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license

  Artistic 2 has already had thorough legal review. Has something happened in copyright law to require a new review?

• Randal L. Schwartz commented on Please relicense from "Perl 5" to MIT or Apache 2.0 license

  I concede. Y'all have made good points. I withdraw any objection to the effort.

• Dean 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, or even just reputational) then lowering adoption friction is a good thing making the effort worthwhile.

  IMO this is the scenario that most suits the rationale for a permissive license.

  If the software is more oriented to hobby users and not intended for businesses to sell it, then it is more up to the author.…

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

  > I do know that just because one of my modules passes all tests on my box does not mean it will pass everywhere.

  One of the critical pieces we learned about rapid development was assuring a complex CI workflow. If you review one of the actions for XML-Parser at https://github.com/cpan-authors/XML-Parser/actions/runs/24453321541, you'll see we test, all versions of perl, with/without LWP, 3 downstream packages, fedora, macos, ubuntu, and 3 flavors of bsd. There are minor things we cannot get without c…