Just when you think Dist-Pen is gone its back again.
Now that I have my Dist::Zilla mostly worked out with all sorts of test goodies it is time that I buckle down and finish off and or clean up all my 'Automated' level test. As an side note, the term 'Automated' tests was a little confusing for me. I eventually figured out that by automated they (however they may be?) mean test that CPANTS will run. Normally these are the test in your 't' dir.
Myself I guess I must just be old school as I always called these module tests and it wasn't until I embarked on my Dist::Zilla trip that I have come to see the advantage of splitting your tests that really have noting to do with the function or you module, POD, spelling, Kwalitee etc, into the hand 'xt' dir.
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.
Last night I finally got to see The Martian. It was a fun movie, and it seems much of the science was solid. One thing that filmmakers still like to do is have computers spit out messages one-character-at-a-time as if they were arriving like telegrams. If you would like to read a file like this, I present the movie-file-reader. First, my very long-hand version:
In Perl 5.26, it will no longer be a safe assumption to assume . is in @INC. This is a good move towards a more secure Perl, but will break the installation of many CPAN modules. For those of you wondering why this was done, see this post for more information.
Many CPAN modules try to do things like: use inc::Module::Install; This depends on . being in @INC. If you invoke Makefile.PL without it, the script will not even run.
We have come up with several ways to mitigate and ultimately fix the problem:
Short Term
Perl 5.26 will support an environment variable "PERL_USE_UNSAFE_INC=1". If you set this, any perl script invoked will include . at the end of @INC. Tentatively, support for this environment variable will be immediately deprecated since long term, the CPAN modules need to simply take this into account.
This is the mother of all 'Author' test cases. This little chap wraps the 'Test::Code::TidyAll' case for you which will both tidy test and a validation test on you r code. Like TidyAll you can configure it to a very high degree. For my Database::Accessor project it is a nice to have so I will give it a good try. First you have to spend a half hour or so installing all the little parts of TidyAll, there are about twenty seven plug-ins plus other little bits. The plug-in requires that a config file is present, I just copied this one from
CPAN
. After getting that file all you need to do is add this to you '.ini' file
I've been listening for quite a few time that we should blog about the events we attend and love. I know it's good for multiple reasons, and I think it's a good advice. I've helped organize, attended and talked at the workshop and I knew I wanted to write about it, but it took me a few days before even thinking on actually do it.
While putting off working on my Perl Advent Calendar submission, I was instead active in resolving bugs in App::ShaderToy and adding some interesting features. The three major features I added this week are, in order of implementation, loading of bitmap images, hot reloading of code and the feature to make the window stay always on top.
It is incredible how much joy quicker iterations bring me while toying around with shaders, tweaking the parameters to see if I can find new visuals.
laying with another seven sisters here is the Dist-Pen today
Well the good news for today seems Dist::Zilla::Plugin::Test::Legal is finally pointing to the correct version at meta::cpan I guess if finally got indexed. Now on with today’s review of seven more Test case Plug-ins.
An 'Author' level test case that implements Test::Pod::No404s this is one for me as I can't tell you how annoying it is to have links that point to nowhere in your POD. So after the usual five minutes or so of installing from cpan I added
berrybrew is the equivalent of Unix's perlbrew for Windows platforms, which uses Strawberry Perl portable instances.
With David's permission and blessing, I've merged the numerous updates and features I wrote into my berrybrew fork into his.
If you want or need his previous version, do a checkout of this commit (6bc28ae).
Many thanks go out to David for originally providing this software, and being polite and easy to deal with. I don't use Windows as my every-day platform, but when I do, this made it much more enjoyable.
This semester I'm teaching Perl 6 to beginners. On a recent homework, student A came to see me for help, so I pretty much wrote the script (if you come for help, you get help!). With every assignment, I provide a "test.pl6" script that lets the students know if they will pass. I stress that they don't need to code for edge cases -- just look to pass the test suite. Well, two students, B and C, copied student A, changed a variable name, and submitted.
If I had only checked for passing tests, I wouldn't have noticed, but I like to see how different students try to solve the problems. I'm often pleasantly surprised as a couple of students have some programming background and try to really use the language's strengths. On this occasion, I was disappointed to find that student's B and C (who have little prior coding experience) had turned in my own code.
After getting my Legal test to work in yesterday's post, funny thin is metacpan still show ver 0.02 as the latest not 0.03 for some reason, I am going to plink away at seven more sisters today;
This one is a 'Release' test case for those out there that will do not automatically increment their version in some way. At this point I want to try, once I get all my testing in order, to use the Dist::Zilla::plug-in::Git::NextVersion plug-in so I will leave this one out for now, but will keep is in the tool bin just in case I can't play nice with my GitHub account.
Perlmodules.net, the site that notifies you about new releases of your favorite modules, just got better for groups, with Multi-User feeds.
If you're part of a project team, and wish to have your team members be able to view and/or modify your feed(s), as of today you can.
The owner of the feed grants read or write access rights to any users they want. If one of these guest users modify the owner's feed (i.e. adds or removes some modules which are tracked by this feed), the owner will get notified by email about all modifications at the end of the day (only if such modifications have occurred).
I've never written games before, but I previously posted a Hangman that I thought was fun. I love the examples of forest fire and Game of Life and wanted to create something like those. I originally wanted to create Pong but decided to try a simple ball that bounces off the walls of a container.
I showed this to my daughter, and she asked if there could be more than one ball, so I added that. They don't, however, bounce off each other, and this gets at the same problem I was mulling with regard to adding obstacles in the field that should deflect the balls. I have a feeling that two-dimensional arrays would help me add this feature. Support for that is coming. Anyway, on to the script!
Today in the Dist-Pen I am going to have a quick Post-ette.
In yesterday’s post I was a little disappointed with Dist::Zilla::Plugin::Test::Legal not working, so for today’s post I was going to have a look at it and see why.
Well to start off I did do a force install yesterday which is never a good way to do things but I was a little short of time. Looking at the code in Dist::Zilla::Plugin::Test::Legal the part I we are interested in is only a few lines long;
In Perl, module loads have always attempted to look for the module you refer to in the current working directory (not necessarily the script location). It has always been this way in Perl. This goes back to the keyword "do" which precedes "require". When this was originally coded, it was also common to include . in your PATH.
Convention changed somewhere in the 90's. It is now considered a bad practice to include . in your PATH. Most languages also do not attempt to look for . in @INC. During my research earlier this year, I found that of all of the scripted languages, only Ruby used to have . in @INC and it was since removed.
I started gathering requirements for the next version of Asciio which will probably be written in Perl6 (Go is a strong contender albeit not as much fun)
Help by adding your requirements as an issue at https://github.com/nkh/Asciio-2.0
Integration with Ditaa is on the list since someone made most of the work, without even contacting me once. http://wiki.cornempire.net/_media/asciiart/diagram2.png
SVG output will be via a2s, https://github.com/dhobsd/asciitosvg, as the author is already an asciio user and some of his users are too.
As of the 7th November 2016 Karen Pauley has officially stepped down as President of the Perl Foundation. Replacing Karen at this present time will be long standing Perl Foundation member Jim Brandt
So that is how it is officially announced and let’s quickly move away from such formal tones for the rest of this article.
It is with a great sense of melancholy, and probably an even profounder sense of respect and gratitude that I am writing this piece so please bear with me if the style seems somewhat stilted or unusual. I know that some people will feel regret at the loss of Karen, I want to stop you all now, don’t think about what we may be losing, think of the changes that have been made.
