Twenty years is a long time in the world of software. That's how long it's been since I last updated my Perl module, File::Finder. But today, thanks to a bug report from a dedicated user, I'm excited to announce the release of version 1.0.0!
For those who don't know, File::Finder is a handy little module that gives you the power of the find command right in your Perl code. It turns out that it wasn't playing nicely with Windows, and it was high time to fix that.
It's a surreal and wonderful feeling to revisit code you wrote two decades ago and find that it's still useful to people. It's a testament to the power and longevity of Perl and the open-source community.
A big thank you to the user who took the time to report the bug and help me bring this module into the modern era. It's moments like these that make you appreciate the collaborative spirit of software development.
You can find the new, Windows-friendly version of File::Finder on CPAN: https://metacpan.org/pod/File::Finder (https://metacpan.org/pod/File::Finder)
Prepare yourselves, the Call for Participation for the December PCC will be happening soon!
DOIs:
DOIs like permanent redirects for publications and research assets. They are managed through organizations like Crossref and are assigned at Arxiv.org, for example. They are not fee, and infact require a relatively large financial investment.
Now that we have our ISSN for Issue #1, https://doi.org/10.63971/spj.2024v01 now works! Each article now has a beautiful, permanent DOI that redirects to it's own URL at science.perlcommunity.org.
The release is imminent while Chris Williams, who usually releases Module::CoreList, is temporarily absent. We were not all sure whether this would require any additional coordination. Phillipe had sent mail to clarify the situation. We concluded that there is no issue because CoreList is an outlier: it is not upstream-CPAN but neither is it upstream-blead, while nevertheless being maintained in core. A lagging CPAN release won’t be a problem, even though that’s not the usual sequence. In the event, Chris responded to the mail with assurance that he is available enough anyway.
We coordinated further about the release, which is coming up the following week.
Release blocker triage this week ended as it began: with no blockers.
I had the pleasure of attending The Perl & Raku Conference (TPRC) 2025 in Greenville, SC as a volunteer. As always, opinions are my own.
The Conference
The conference went quite well. Unfortunately, a major weather event disrupted flights across the US, particularly around Atlanta, causing travel issues for some attendees and speakers. This led to a few talk cancellations.
We adopted it by consolidating the two talk tracks into one. There was still a diverse range of topics, and judging by the audience reactions, some of the talks were very well received.
The conference was attended by 40-50 people.
Main Room
The Venue
The event was hosted at a Holiday Inn Express in Greenville, which turned out to be an excellent choice. The hotel was clean, recently renovated (following flood repairs last year), and very reasonably priced: $139 + tax per night for a suite. The staff were quite friendly and accommodating. It also proved to be a great low-cost venue for hosting a conference - more on that below.
I had created the library in C as part of a bigger project to create a multithreaded and hardware (GPU, and soon TPU) accelerated library to manipulate fingerprints for text. At some point, I figured one can have fun vibe coding the interface to Perl. The first post in the series just dropped ; it provides the background, rationale, the prompt and the first output by Claude 3.7. Subsequent posts will critique the solution and document subsequent interactions with the chatbot.
Part 2 will be about the alienfile (a task that botched by the LLM). Suggestions for subsequent prompts welcome ; as I said this is a project whose C backend (except the TPU part) is nearly complete, so I am just having fun with the Perl part.
In particular I'd like to invite anyone who regrets not submitting a talk to the TPRC or who has gotten bit by the speaking bug. You are welcome to give your talk remotely.
Graham couldn’t make it, so only Aristotle and Philippe this week.
We discussed the structure of the feature.pm documentation and how unfeatures should be covered. Philippe has provided a first patch which extends the description of each unfeature with a note stating from which feature bundle onward it is disabled.
Relesae blocker triage continues. The meeting began without any unresolved blockers and ended the same way.
Philippe plans to ship 5.42.0-RC1 as soon as the last missing perldelta entries are in.
Remember! Click Continue Reading to see all the text.
I am selling my villa unit and downsizing, probably in a month or so.
There may be a period when I am off-line.
In Australia villa unit means (usually) a stand-alone building in a small block of units.
I have 2-bedroom unit and am moving into a retirement (Yikes!) village to a 1-bedroom unit.
The are various reasons but one is this month I turned 75, much to my amazement and horror.
I still live independently, drive, have 2 miniature dogs, manage my own medicine, etc. So - all good ATM.
And yes, I am still programming. I more-or-less monthly release https://savage.net.au/misc/Perl.Wiki.html,
my curated compendium of Perl module, and I am slowly automating the creation of this wiki.
The next step will be to output the wiki as a jsTree (https://www.jstree.com/),
but moving - as you might know - consumes a lot of time.....
We are asking for a $30 donation at sign-up, but you may email science@perlcommunity.org to inquire about a discounted or free code we have for non-profits and those in between jobs.
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The Dancer Core Team is excitedly preparing a major release of Dancer2, 2.0.0. In advance of this, I'd like to give you all a preview of what to expect:
A handful of bug fixes
Customizable scrubber/censor engine (when dumping errors, etc. - a long requested feature)
Remove Template::Tiny fork from core (Template::Tiny support remains, but ether graciously merged our customizations into Template::Tiny)
Remove Dancer2::Template::Simple from the core of Dancer2
New documentation, courtesy of a TPRF grant
Removal of deprecated code (according to our deprecation policy)
Official support for Perl 5.22 and newer
The following features are possible, but not likely for 2.0.0 (but maybe soon thereafter):
Bring your own config engine (TOML, JSON, etc.)
Using Throwable to produce errors
I'm estimating a release in the next 2-4 weeks. There are still a few bikesheds to paint, cats to herd, and yaks to shave.
If you have questions or feedback, we'd love to hear from you! Until then, keep Dancing, then Dance a little happier! :)
In the past, it took two years to merge my first PAUSE on Plack branch into the master and three years to merge the next PAUSE on Mojolicious (actually, two years to deploy and another year to merge). Now the question was: how long would it take to merge the next big thing, multifactor authentication for PAUSE? Two years, three years, or maybe four years this time? I already had a two-year-old draft branch and initially wished to merge it this year. However, things went differently.
This release includes a number of important changes that we hope will improve stability with threaded Perl.
If you are using DBD::Oracle I would ask that you try it out in your non-production environments initially and perhaps if you are confident there after, in your production environments.
The branch for it is here on github. I am personally grateful for people spending time and sending in pull requests , there is no monetary support for this driver although Oracle's open source community manager is actively engaged in discussions on issues and pull requests.
Github actions are configured on the repo and the quite thorough library of unit tests are run against Oracle XE on Ubuntu. This provides good signal but with extremely limited coverage of operating systems and database versions.
Due to the lack of variety in automated testing on Github - and the business critical nature of most Oracle databases - my recommendation is to mirror the Github repo in to your organization's repos and configure CI testing against your specific combination of Oracle versions, operating systems, and settings. The Github actions can be adapted to Gitlab reasonably quickly and give you a very high level of confidence before trialing new versions in production.
Over the past year, I’ve been self-studying XS and have now decided to share my learning journey through a series of blog posts. This tenth post introduces you to what I call closures in XS.
Release blocker triage continues. Several more blockers have been resolved. We identified no blockers among new tickets but did consider #23346 and may ship it even if we do not consider it a blocker.
We discussed some feedback regarding the fix for CVE-2025-40909 and requested that the patch be amended. A perldelta entry is also missing before we can ship the security releases.
We discussed who will do then stable release and when. RC1 will be published by Philippe Bruhat on June 20th.
We went over the scalar-context pair constructor proposal. Changing the fat arrow in general is out of the question and we don’t think any other proposal is likely to work.
We went over the 2-arg open proposal. It seems mostly trivial to do and worthwhile as well, but the real complexity is in the implicit open done by readline. We will outline our thoughts on the thread.
