CPAN Day marks the date of the first recorded upload to CPAN: Andreas König uploaded Symdump 1.20 (it's since been renamed Devel::Symdump).

On CPAN Day this year, you could do some small thing to help celebrate. This could be as simple as emailing the author of a module that you regularly use, and say "thank you". It may not sound like much, but it's great to be on the receiving end.

There are lots of other things you could do to help someone else's module. For a previous CPAN Day I posted a list of ideas.

Or if you've got your own distributions on CPAN, you could fix a bug, or merge an outstanding pull request *cough*. This year I plan to merge at least one PR, and do at least one release to CPAN. I'll submit a PR too.

What will you do?

The Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS) started yesterday (Thursday 11th May) in Lyon, France. 35 dedicated toolchain developers have assembled for four days of intensive discussions and co-working. Not only does a lot get done in these four days, but we send everyone home with longer todo lists, fired up to keep working on them.

The developers come from around the world, and we're only available to do this with the generous support of all of our sponsors. You've seen individual posts for our Platinum and Gold sponsors, but in this post we'd like to tell you about our other sponsors. If you get the chance, please thank them: all Perl developers benefit from this summit.

In this article I'm going to show you how to specify dependencies for your CPAN distributions: the other Perl and CPAN modules that your distribution relies on. This is the fourth article in a series. The first article gave a general introduction to distribution metadata. The second article introduced the five phases for which dependencies, or prerequisites, can be specified. The third article presented the types, or relationships, that can be specified for each dependency.

This article is brought to you by cPanel, Inc., a Gold sponsor for the Perl Toolchain Summit. cPanel are a well-known user and supporter of Perl, and we're very grateful for their support. More about cPanel at the end of this article.

The Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS) is the annual event where we assemble the people who are actively working on the Perl toolchain, and give them 4 days to work together. In this blog post, we'll look at how we decide what everyone will work on, and give you a chance to make suggestions.

This blog post is brought to you by Perl Jobs by Perl Careers, which as well as helping Perl programmers find jobs, supports a number of community events, including the QA Hackathon last year.

In the previous article in this series we gave a general introduction to the distribution metadata which is included in releases as files META.json and/or META.yml. In this article I'll drill into more detail at one critical component of a distribution's metadata: dependencies, also known as prerequisites (usually shortened to "prereqs"). This is how you specify other CPAN modules that your distribution depends on.

This post is brought to you by Booking.com, a platinum sponsor for the Perl Toolchain Summit. Booking.com is one of the largest Perl shops in the world, and so depends heavily on the toolchain. Thank you to Booking.com for supporting the summit.

All CPAN releases (these days) include a metadata file which has information about the distribution. It can be used by tools like CPAN clients (when installing modules), but it's also helpful for other tool writers, and people analysing the structure of CPAN. The metadata file will be called META.yml or META.json, and recent releases often contain both.

In this blog post we'll introduce some of what's in the files and how they're used by CPAN clients.

This post is brought to you by FastMail, a gold sponsor for this year's Toolchain Summit, which is being held in Lyon, France in May. The summit is only possible with the support of companies like FastMail. We'll be doing a series of toolchain-related blog posts, to thank our sponsors.

On Monday 27th March, the Thames Valley Perl Mongers (TVPM) are having a mini tech talks session in Reading. Talks are going to be about 15 minutes each. Speakers and topics are given below, along with details of the venue.

Any and all are welcome to join us.

This is the third in a series of articles about MetaCPAN. The first article described the two main parts that make up the MetaCPAN project, the API and the search interface. The second article gave a high level summary of how the API uses Elasticsearch to hold and search information about CPAN distributions and authors.

In this post we'll look at how MetaCPAN links to other parts of the CPAN ecosystem, how the physical setup has changed with MetaCPAN v1, and another service that v1 has made available.

This post is brought to you by Booking.com, our second platinum sponsor. Booking.com is one of the largest Perl shops in the world, and have done a lot to support our community over the years. Thank you to Booking.com for supporting meta::hack.

This is the second in a series of articles, which we're writing to celebrate meta::hack, our first MetaCPAN hackathon, which is currently (Nov 17th through 21st) taking place in Chicago.

This hackathon was by invitation only, since it had a very specific goal: completing migration of the live service to MetaCPAN v1 (which includes a major Elasticsearch upgrade, from 0.20 to 2.4, or nearly 70 stable releases forward). Once that's done, any remaining time will be spent fixing bugs, and discussing what comes next. The attendees are Olaf Alders (founder of MetaCPAN), Mickey Nasriachi, Leo Lapworth, Tom Sibley, Joel Berger, Doug Bell, Brad Lhotsky and Zach Dykstra. Matt Trout is contributing remotely.

This post is brought to you by cPanel, a platinum sponsor for meta::hack. cPanel are a well-known user and supporter of Perl, and we're very grateful for their support. More about cPanel at the end of this article.

This week a small group of dedicated Perl developers are gathering in Chicago for meta::hack, the first MetaCPAN hackathon. The primary goal is to complete the transition to Elasticsearch v2, a major undertaking that was started more than a year ago.

Because all the participants are volunteers, this was only possible with sponsorship. Over the next few days we'll be sharing information about MetaCPAN and the work going on, and acknowledging some of the key sponsors.

This post is brought to you by FastMail, a gold sponsor for meta::hack. FastMail is a stalwart supporter of the Perl community — they also sponsored the QA Hackathon this year.