CPAN Day marks the day when the first distribution was recorded as being uploaded to CPAN. That was 16th August 1995, so we've been uploading modules for 21 years now!
On CPAN Day you could release something to CPAN, send a pull request on someone else's distribution, blog about Perl, or just head to the pub with fellow Perl hackers.
As you're probably very aware by now, the Perl QA Hackathon was last weekend, and it was a great success. Just under 40 people assembled in Rugby in the UK, to work on the Perl and CPAN infrastructure that everyone using Perl relies on. Many bugs were fixed, problems solved, ideas germinated, and cans kicked down the road. Those same people working alone for 4 days would not have achieved anywhere near as much, and that's why we do this, every year.
The QA Hackathon (QAH) will be kicking off on Thursday morning this week, starting 4 days of intensive work on the CPAN toolchain, test frameworks, and other parts of the CPAN ecosystem. The participants will be gathering from all over the world on the Wednesday evening.
The QAH wouldn't be possible without the support of all of our generous sponsors. In this post we acknowledge the silver, bronze, and individual sponsors. Many of the Perl hackers taking part wouldn't be able to attend without your support. On behalf of the organisers and all attendees, thank you!
This is the second in a series of blog posts about the Perl toolchain and the collection of tools and modules around it that are central to the CPAN we have today. In the first post we introduced PAUSE and CPAN, and outlined how you release a module onto CPAN, and how someone else might find it and install it. In this article we're going to cover what comes before the release: creating, developing, and testing a module for release to CPAN.
This post is brought to you by ActiveState, who we're happy to announce are a gold sponsor for the QA Hackathon this year. ActiveState are long-term supporters of Perl, and shipped the first Perl distro for Windows, ActivePerl.
This is the first in a series of blog posts about the Perl toolchain and the collection of tools and modules around it that are central to the CPAN we have today. These posts will illustrate the scope of things worked on at the QA Hackathon. We'll start with the core lifecycle of CPAN modules, focusing on PAUSE and CPAN.
This post is brought to you by FastMail, a gold sponsor for this year's QA Hackathon (QAH). It is only with the support of companies like FastMail that we're able to bring together the lead developers of these tools at the QAH.
We're delighted to announce that ZipRecruiter has decided to sponsor this year's QA Hackathon.
ZipRecruiter.com is a website where job seekers can find jobs all over the world, and employers can list their open positions. Not only will those positions be listed on ZipRecruiter.com, they will be pushed to more than one hundred job boards and social networks. Job seekers get free email alerts with postings that are tailor-made for their skill set and location.
We're happy to announce that the 9th annual Perl QA Hackathon (QAH) will be held in Rugby in the United Kingdom. The event will run from Thursday 21st April to Sunday 24th April.
The QAH is a face-to-face gathering of the lead developers who work on the Perl toolchain that all Perl programmers rely on and build upon. The first QAH was held in Norway, in 2008, and so far it's always been in Europe. The QAH provides dedicated time over 4 days to work on the critical systems and tools, with all the right people in the same place.
CPAN Weekly is a mailing list for Perl 5 programmers. Each week there will be one short message sent to the list, with a brief description of a CPAN module, and example usage.
The idea is not to provide a tutorial, but just to make you aware of the module, and show one basic use case. By planting seeds in your mental Perl toolbox, hopefully next time you have certain needs you will think "oh, I read about a module for that!", rather than "I'll just write a module for that".
You can sign up at cpan-weekly.org.
If the Pull Request Challenge hasn't provided enough pull request action for you, you could sign up for 24 Pull Requests. The idea is to do 24 pull requests in the 24 days before Christmas Day. You have to find the repositories yourself.
All you need to sign up is a github username.
Perl hackers have now, as of today the 16th August 2015, been uploading Perl modules onto CPAN via PAUSE for 20 years. Andreas König, who did that first upload, is still releasing to CPAN, and as I write this his most recent upload is the same module that was first released to CPAN.
This post is a brief summary of CPAN's history.
If you've got one or more distributions on CPAN, then on CPAN Day you could go through them and see if there are any ideas you've had which aren't listed in the issue tracker (typically RT or github issues).
If you don't have any distributions on CPAN, then you could go through the modules that you regularly use and see if there are any issues you could raise.
I'll expand a bit on what I mean, and why it might be a good use of your time.
We've probably all got one or more modules that we're very thankful for. Maybe you use it again and again. Maybe the fact that it exists saved you from having to write it yourself. Maybe it's such a well-crafted module that you don't need to think about it, but always have it on your tool belt.
Maybe for/on CPAN Day, you could do or organise something related to that module, as a way to say thank you, perhaps to improve it for all of us?
Here are some ideas.
CPAN Day marks the date of the first upload to CPAN, on 16th August 1995. Last year was the first time we celebrated CPAN Day, and many of us did a lot of different things. Why not do something helpful for CPAN on Sunday 16th August?
The QA Hackathon wouldn't be possible without the support of all of our generous sponsors. In this post we cover the sponsors not previously thanked here, including the individual members of the Perl community who made personal donations.
You can read about some of the things done at the hackathon in the blog posts, linked off this page on the QAH website.
The Perl Quality Assurance Hackathon (hereafter QAH) is an annual 4-day gathering of the people who work on the core CPAN toolchain and associated systems & services. This gives them dedicated time to work on these systems together, solving hard problems and working out how to move everything forward.
Like pretty much everything in the Perl world, these are all volunteers, so our approach is to get sponsorship to cover expenses (travel, accommodation, working space, meals) for as much of the gathering as possible. If your company relies on Perl, ask yourself how much you rely on the toolchain working smoothly? Perhaps you could persuade someone to sponsor the QAH this year?
The CPAN toolchain isn't glamorous, so generally doesn't get much press, but it's an essential part of our world. So over the next few weeks we'll be posting some short articles to raise awareness and hopefully encourage some sponsorship.
The CPAN Pull Request challenge has had way more signups than I was expecting: 343 so far! Some are very experienced Perl programmers and CPAN contributors; some are long-term Perl programmers using this as a way to "give back"; a few are new to everything.
I wouldn't have predicted 300 pull requests in the entire year. Now we might
get that in January alone!
I know some people are concerned of the effect that this wave of locusts
enthusiastic contributors might have, particularly if authors have to start
dealing with pull requests that don't really add much value.
As a result I think it's probably helpful to give some more details on the challenge, give CPAN authors a chance to comment, and even to opt out.
Yesterday (August 16th 2014) we celebrated the anniversary of the first upload to CPAN by Andreas König (ANDK) (as he worked on what became PAUSE). It was the 19th anniversary, but the first that we've marked in this way.
In one day, 107 people uploaded 775 releases, 41 of which were the first uploads of new distributions, and 10 of which were the first upload by new CPAN contributors. The first two numbers were outright records, and the second equalled the previous best. All of those numbers were higher than I expected.
My project for CPAN Day has been to pull together a history of CPAN:
In best CPAN tradition, this is the work of dozens of people, who patiently responded to my pestering via email over the last few weeks. Thanks to everyone who helped get it to this point.
CPAN Day (August 16th, UTC) is nearly here. Someone asked me what the goals are, if any, for CPAN Day. When BOOK came up with the idea, we both thought it was an opportunity to celebrate CPAN, but also a chance to reflect on how we got here, and to think about how we can keep driving it forward.
I also saw it as an opportunity to bang on my curation drum — give everyone ideas for how they might improve their distributions, or those of others, and in doing so improve the overall quality of CPAN.
CPAN was created by us, for us, so do whatever feels right to you.
If you do something for CPAN Day, please tweet about it with the #cpanday hashtag.
Travis is a continuous integration (CI) platform for github users, which is free to use. You can set it up so that every time you push one of your CPAN distributions to github, Travis will test it against different versions of Perl.
I've only just started playing with Travis, but I can already see benefits for using it in parallel with CPAN Testers. Why not give it a go on CPAN Day? :-)
Perl hacker since 1992.