CPAN Testers needs recurring funding to cover its hosting costs. If you, or your company, rely on CPAN, then please seriously consider setting up a standing order to donate £50 (or some multiple thereof) to CPAN Testers every year. We encourage companies to use a multiple of the base £50 that reflects their reliance on CPAN and thus CPAN Testers.
CPAN Testers is an invaluable resource for all of us: it tests CPAN releases across a wide range of operating systems, versions and build configurations of Perl. This benefits the Perl community in two ways: (1) improving quality and (2) avoiding problems. If you use CPAN modules, then CPAN Testers is making those modules more reliable for you.
If you're an author, your releases will be tested on operating systems and versions of Perl that you may not have access to, and you'll be told if there are any failures. Addressing these failures makes your module more dependable. If you're going to use other modules from CPAN in your distribution, then CPAN Testers gives a good indication of how likely it is that they'll break your installation. If there are multiple modules for a given task, you can pick the one with fewest CPAN Testers failures.
As many of us I often try to achieve more than possible. To combat that its very useful to combine seemingly unrelated efforts and use synergies. Out of such thoughts came the idea for that Module (not yet on CPAN).
[This is a post in a new, probably long-ass, series. I do not promise that the next post in the series will be next week. Just that I will eventually finish it, someday. Unless I get hit by a bus.]
So, last time I laid out my dissatisfaction with existing date modules and described what I was looking for in a feature set out of a potential new module. Well, a feature set is a good thing to have, but it’s a lower-level view. Let’s take a step back and try to pin down exactly what need I want my date module to satisfy; that is, what niche am I hoping it it will fill? When you’re looking for a date module to solve a particular problem, which problems will lead you to this one?1
If you're taking part in Hacktoberfest, you may have noticed that the list of suggested projects doesn't contain any Perl projects. So I've created CPANtoberfest, a list of CPAN projects with github repos, that you could hack on to get your free t-shirt.
The Vagrant PDE is a VirtualBox image ready for Perl development with many of the CPAN modules you'd want to use.
Upgraded the Operating System to Ubuntu 2015.04
Added Rakudo Perl 2015.09
Added several Perl Modules
Upgraded all the other Perl Modules
If you have never used it, you can follow the instructions for the Vagrant Perl Development Environment.
If you already have the previous version installed, you can follow the instructions
to upgrade PDE.
Anybody want to be an organizer for YAPC::NA? We're open to anybody that wants to help out. Really, our only rule is that you have to help out. We don't want to be organizing in front of spectators / peanut gallery. If you are willing to roll up your sleeves and do some work, we're happy to have you. Our next planning meeting will be in a couple weeks. If you want to participate, please complete the doodle poll prior to Monday, October 5th:
The goal of Hacktoberfest is to get more people contributing to open source by submitting at least one pull request (PR) during the month of October. If you sign up and do at least four PRs in the month, then you'll get a free t-shirt.
At MaxMind, we created the MMDB format because we needed a format that was very fast and highly portable. MMDB comes with supported readers in many languages. In this blog post, we'll use Perl modules to create an MMDB file which contains an access list of IP addresses. This kind of database could be used when allowing access to a VPN or a hosted application.
I have started compiling summaries of the Perl 5 Porters (p5p) mailing list. Thank you to everyone who helped improve them. Following is the first report.
My August assignment (yes, I had to "stick" with it for September) in the CPAN Pull Request Challenge was Test::Aggregate. In August, I went on vacation, and CPAN Testers' reporting was down, so I decided to solve the task after I return from the YAPC in Granada and ask for a new distribution for September with a two-week delay. It wasn't that easy, though.
When I started working on P6SGI, I thought, "Hey, I'll just update PSGI to use
Perl 6, take advantage of some async data structures, and be done." That is
not how this process has gone down. First, I learned that I needed to know
more about Perl 6. Then, I found that I need to know more about HTTP/1.1 and
more about PSGI. Most recently, I have been researching HTTP/2, Mojolicious,
WebSockets, Akka, and a whole pile of other things.
So, here's the progress report on thing that have changed in the last week or so
on our way toward a complete P6SGI standard, which is still a ways off.
So I really like to validate email addresses using Email::Valid. But yesterday, I got a bug report. Some system was sending emails to another system with addresses containing a space right after the @. That other system was totally unable to deal with those.
"But I do email address validation" I thought. "Not just with a stupid regular expression like .+\@.+, but with Email::Valid". So I added a test to our suite and sure enough, that new test failed.
Lesson learned: Read the documentation of the modules you use.