Have you play with the new command line switch -g in Perl?

Please checkout this post for more information.

https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/slurp-in-perl

Back to the full roster, albeit with Philippe attending from on the road.

We mainly went over the list of PPCs, with an eye toward the fact that this release cycle is coming to a close.

• PPC0033 (ampersand method calls) is approved.
• PPC0030 (equ) does not have an implementation ready for this release cycle and PPC0031 (eq:u) is controversial.
• PPC0027 (any/all) is basically accepted other than needing its feature flag naming figured out.

As an aside regarding PPC0027, we reiterated that we would like use feature ':all' to go away if possible. It was never a good idea anyway, but has become untenable with the introduction of feature flags like indirect and bareword_filehandles, which we expect to have many more of in the future. Since their purpose is to be disabled rather than enabled by default, a simple toggling of all features (on or off) is a nonsensical request.

[P5P posting of this summary]

I'm resigning from the board position at TPF (The Perl Foundation) also known as TPRF (The Perl and Raku Foundation).

tl;dr

After eight years with the foundation board, the time has come for me to step down. While I'm leaving the board, I intend to remain an active member of the Perl community and continue contributing in meaningful ways for Perl users and developers. You'll still see me at various Perl events; and perhaps Raku ones, too.

Over the years, I've learned a great deal, (hopefully) made a positive impact, and had a lot of fun.

Why I'm stepping down #1. The board needs a refresh

As I've noted before, having long-term board members at a nonprofit has advantages and disadvantages. My resignation opens the door for new perspectives and ideas. The foundation's board has started searching for backfill, which is good for the board's long-term success.

People usually don't think about Perl's type system. Some would even mistakenly claim it doesn't have one. It is, however, a most unusual one that doesn't really look like anything else.

What is a type anyway? And what is a type system? I'm not going to precisely define it here, that's for academics, but generally speaking a type is a fundamental property of a variable or value that determines what operations can and can not be done with it and what invariants it must hold. In a strong type system it is a stable trait: it can't change over the lifetime of the value/variable.

In some type systems containers are typed (such as C) and values really don't exist separate from containers. In other typed systems containers are typeless but values are typed (e.g. Python, Javascript, …). There are languages where both values and containers are typed (e.g. Java, C#), typically this means that the container constrains the values in it.

Contrary to what you might expect, Perl has the latter sort of typesystem, but with a twist.

FOSDEM 2025 is just around the corner, and you know what that means—great talks, amazing people, and of course… fantastic food! 🥂

The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF) is once again bringing the community together for a special dinner during the FOSDEM weekend. If you’re an active member of the Perl and Raku ecosystem, this is your chance to relax, connect, and celebrate with fellow developers, contributors, and enthusiasts.

📅 When? Saturday Evening, during FOSDEM weekend
📍 Where? A great venue in Brussels (details will be shared with registered attendees)
💬 Who? Active community members, contributors, and Perl/Raku enthusiasts

Why You Should Join 🍻

• Meet fellow Perl and Raku hackers in a relaxed, social atmosphere.
• Celebrate our open-source wins with great conversations and laughter.
• Enjoy a delicious meal, because good food makes great coding even better!
• Forge new collaborations and chat about everything from regex wizardry to the future of Perl and Raku.

Secure Your Spot! 📝

All three of us were present:

• We agreed on not terrible feature names for PPC0027: keyword_any and keyword_all. These can now be merged.
• This led to a brief excursion on the fact that it would be good to have proper iterators as part of the language. But we quickly agreed that the PSC meeting is too small of a margin for that subject.
• We talked about the failure of “experimental features”, and possible approaches to remediate that problem. It is going to be difficult to address technically. Philippe pushed for a PPC about the subject.
• We took note of the upcoming freeze period and surveyed the changes we think should be merged beforehand. The only thing we weren’t already tracking is the coderef-in-stash optimization, which we decided should be reverted once again and re-attempted earlier in the cycle next time.

[P5P posting of this summary]

We are very happy to announce that OTOBO supports the German Perl Workshop!

Die Rother OSS GmbH ist Source Code Owner und Maintainer der Service Management-Plattform OTOBO.

Gemeinsam mit der Community entwickeln wir OTOBO kontinuierlich weiter und sorgen dafür, dass das Tool zu 100 % Open Source bleibt.

Unsere Kunden unterstützen wir mit partnerschaftlicher Beratung, Training, Entwicklung, Support und Managed Services.

Perl Wiki V 1.22

Intro

There are several competing philosophies for wrapping external C libraries. One is that the XS module should hide all the details of the library and provide a clean “Perlish interface”. The opposite extreme is that the external C functions should be exposed to Perl using an extremely minimal XS layer, or the Foreign Function Interface (FFI) and all the logic for working with the library should be written in Perl.

I advocate something in the middle. I think that a good interface should expose as much of the low-level as possible (to make the most usage of that library possible by other Perl modules) while “padding the sharp edges” so that it is difficult for Perl-side usage to crash the program. Higher level features can be provided in addition to the low level API via XS, Perl modules, or both.

Only Philippe and Aristotle this time.

We spent most of our time on the PPC process, and started by merging Dave Cross’s PR for a static PPC web site. Many thanks to Dave once again.

We discussed revising the PPC process, and started by picking more specific names for the various statuses of a PPC, which we’ll soon apply to the existing PPCs.

[P5P posting of this summary]

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 security issues

The contact point is very important for modules that have been around for a long time and have had several authors over the years. When there is a long list of maintainers, it's not clear who to contact.

You don't want people reporting security vulnerabilities in public on the RT or GitHub issues for your project, nor do you want a post on IRC, Reddit or social media about it.

If your software is on GitHub, you can set up private vulnerability reporting. GitLab has a similar system.

Otherwise, a single email address is acceptable. An alias that forwards to all of the maintainers or at the very least, a single maintainer who has agreed to that role will work.

I know, thinking about where to put what in a code file sounds lame to most artisan hero's that fly by intuition, but I find it actually helpful. Here my article about it on dev.to and you can tell its written with Perl in mind. I just wanted to publish outside to reach more people and maybe even bring some in.

Having reached a certain level of proficiency with Mojolicious and Vue.js, I made the decision to dedicate some of my free time every week to develop "cool and somewhat useful" (according to some) open-source web apps in Perl.

The goal is to practice and learn, and maybe also help make Perl a bit more popular.

My first such project is Gandalf Links, a link-aggregator website (inspired by pinboard.in) that's pretty much complete and can be installed and run very easily with Docker.

At the front page's footer you can find a link to the source code. A full list of current and future features can be found here.

If interested to contribute in ANY way (ideas, know-how, coding) please do get in touch with me via e-mail, through the form that's on gandalf.gr, or maybe use the project's issue tracker. I've done almost all I can on this project, now I'm looking for other people's expertise.

I'd also be looking for ideas on what other self-hosted web app to work on next (with you if you're interested).

Regards,

- Gandalf (first cousin of the copyrighted one)

Back to the full roster.

• We talked again about Perl 42. We think it may already be too late for it in this cycle, so we want to make a thorough case for it by releasing a side tarball for the end of this cycle, and if no technical blocker is found, actually do the jump to 44 in the next cycle.
• We listed out next steps for the next point release.
• Aristotle summarized the suggested simplification of our plan for TLS in core, but a fuller discussion next week is necessary.
• PPC 0014 (English names) has no implementer.
• There was a branch for PPC 0021 (Optional chaining) but the implementer hit a wall and got stuck.
• Regarding the dual PPCs 0030 (equ) and 0031 (eq:u), we lean towards the former. Options would be cleaner if we had a big and regular set of them across operators, but neither is the case, and they constitute an extra concept.
• Many thanks to Dave Cross for providing an initial implementation of a PPC index page. We decided to merge it as is, then iterate on the PPC process afterwards, instead of doing it the other way around.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Simplest is if you go to my homepage and follow the links to my Debian and Perl pages.

Note: The Debian and Mojolicious updates are minor, but a lot of changes are in the Perl wiki.

We are delighted to announce the new release, which includes 57 significant bug fixes compared to the previous 2.1.8 version. This update addresses a range of important issues and enhances the overall stability and performance.

More details at https://blog.foswiki.org/Blog/Foswiki219IsReleased

Next PCC: July 3-4, 2025 in Austin, Texas USA

See entire the post to learn about our future plans, in perpetuity.

The very first Perl Community Conference was a tremendous success thanks to everyone of you authors and speakers. Many thanks to PCC Co-Organizer Will "The Chill" Braswell, our friends at the Diogenes Hackerspace (in Austin, Texas), and all the participants both online and in person! We'll be following up soon about posting the videos. The next stage will be editing and publishing Issue #2 of the Science Perl Journal. The schedule from the Winter'24 PCC should be a clue about some of its contents. We have discussed offering a "Letters to the Editor" section to address feedback from friends and foes alike. More on this will be announced in future posts.

Future Plans in Perpetuity

Just Graham and Philippe this time.

• We talked a bit about PPC 0025 (Perl version), but didn’t say anything new
• Regarding PPC 0030 (new operators) vs PPC 0031 (flags on operators), we continue to think that flags on operators bring more confusion than value (PSC #168). Perl is an operator-rich language, so adding new operators when needed sounds right.
• As for the discussion on implicit stringification of references, we think that adding more runtime effects to strict doesn’t really fit. The issue would likely be better addressed with a new warning (and is very similar to the uninitialized warning when dealing with undef).

[P5P posting of this summary]

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 security policy to your distribution, so that people know how and where to report a security issue with your module.)

If you have a cpan.org email alias, does it forward to the correct email address?

And most importantly, if you are taking time away from maintaining Perl modules, please add ADOPTME or NEEDHELP as co-maintainers to mark your modules as available.

Thanks, and best wishes for 2025.

Prioritisation of Panic

Let me start off by asking the folk on this platform one question. Imagine a scenario that you had lost something important with multiple potential negative consequences. For instance losing a bunch of keys including your car keys, your house keys, your changing room locker keys and a USB stick. What would be the greatest cause for alarm? I suspect that while there may be many possible answers aligned with each individual’s life priorities, the real men in this group know that the most feared is the reaction following the revelation to the wife. For while any calamitous occurrence may be approached objectively, with rationality, reflection and hopefully recovery, this particularly troublesome phase involves heightened emotions, reactivating Mrs Saif’s indelible memories of my many past failings. Objectivity, while desirable in principle, has to deal with such a tainted history.