After two weeks of various people absent on various travels, we got the band back together for a fairly adminstrivial meeting.

• Contentious changes freeze has set in, so we will now be monitoring for release blockers. We took stock of the currently open issues and PRs from this release cycle and will be triaging for blockers in the coming weeks.

• We need release managers for two more dev releases and the final. Paul will probably take over one of the dev releases. We are figuring out the rest.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Hi All
Big news today.
I've uploaded these files to my Wiki Haven:
a. Perl.Wiki.html V 1.40
b. jsTree V 1.08 (i.e. the matching version of Perl.Wiki).
This version is much nicer than the previous one.
c. MojoLicious.Wiki.html V 1.14

And I've uploaded to CPAN: CPAN::MetaCurator V 1.40.

This version no longer ships 02packages.details.txt, nor a packages table in the SQLite db.

Further, I'm about to start coding CPAN::MetaPackages, which will do nothing but load
02packages.details.txt into its own SQLite db. Then CPAN::MetaCurator will have its own db
and simultaneously link to the packages db.

The point: To make CPAN::MetaCurator's build.dh.sh run much faster, down from
15 hours on my humble Lenovo M70Q 'Tiny' desktop to 1 second, basically.

And the next step is then to ship only differences between successive versions of
02packages.details.txt, so that updating packages.sqlite will be lightning fast.

Tech trio embrace in harmony: Dancer2, DBIx::Class::Async and HTMX.
For more information, please follow this link: https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/dancer2-dbic-async-htmx

Sydney Perl continues regular meetings with our next in February

Please join us on Tuesday 24th Feb 2026 at Organic Trader Pty Ltd.
Unit 13/809-821 Botany Road Rosebery

6:30pm to 9pm.

Chances are folks will head to a nearby Pub afterward.

I will talk about my 5 years working at Meta Platforms and 6 months at Amazon Inc. specifically contrasting their engineering culture, and generally discussing what Google calls an SRE culture. Contrasting my experiences at Big Tech to "Middle Tech".

Getting there:

Come in the front door marked
"Konnect" then take the first door on the right, and up the stairs to
Level 1.

Mascot station + 20 minute walk or 358 bus to Gardener's Road if you
don't want to walk so far.

Or Waterloo Metro station + 309 bus to Botany Road after Harcourt Parade.

All three of us attended.

• We spent a long time debating how to proceed with Karl’s proposal to restrict legal identifier names for security. No consensus emerged, and we resolved to ask the question in a venue with wider reach than p5p.

• We are faced with an absent maintainer of a CPAN-upstream dual-life module, namely Encode. We discussed this situation in general terms but did not get beyond the question itself – partly due to time constraints. We agreed that this seems likely to occur more often in the future and that p5p will need an agreed way of dealing with it, but what that should be is too big a topic to be contained within the PSC meeting format.

• There are multiple PRs currently in flight, some of them rather large, including Paul’s magic v2 and attributes v2. We decided that we are too close to contentious changes freeze in this cycle to merge those.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Get them, as always, from my Wiki Haven.

Last year, I wrote that the total cost of a Perl Toolchain Summit is in the order of 50,000€. It's all covered by sponsors and attendees (and the leftovers from the previous years).

We're now preparing the Perl Toolchain Summit 2026, which will be held from Thursday, April 23rd until Sunday, April 26th, in Vienna, Austria.

Today, I'll briefly explain why we need sponsors for the event, and propose a new way to think about sponsorship to our corporate sponsors.

Hi fellow Perlists,

Now that I am retired, I have a bit more time for personal projects. One project dear to my heart would be to demonstrate strong features of Perl for programmers from other backgrounds. So I'm planning a https://dev.to/ series on "beautiful Perl features", comparing various aspects of Perl with similar features in Java, Python or Javascript.

There are many points to discuss, ranging from small details like flexibility of quote delimiters or the mere simplicity of allowing a final comma in a list, to much more fundamental features like lexical scoping and dynamic scoping.

Since I'm not a native english speaker, and since my knowledge of Java and Python is mostly theoretical, I would appreciate help if some of you would volunteer for spending some time in proofreading the projected posts. Just send an email to my CPAN account if you feel like participating.

Thanks in advance :-), Laurent Dami

With Leon at FOSDEM it was only Paul and Aristotle this week, but the discussion ranged widely.

How do you make the world’s best Perl ORM non-blocking without rewriting your entire schema? Find out the answer in this post: https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/dbix-class-async-evolution

"Perl is slow."

I've heard this for years, well since I started. You probably have too. And honestly? For a long time, I didn't have a great rebuttal. Sure, Perl's fast enough for most things, it's well known for text processing, glueing code and quick scripts. But when it came to object heavy code, the critics have a point.

We are happy to announce that Otobo also is part of our event!

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.
https://otobo.io/de/unternehmen/karriere/

All three of us discussed:

• We agree with the general idea of an improved PRNG, so we encourage Scott to continue working on the PR to get it into a polished state ready for merge
• Haarg’s “missing import” PR now looks good; Paul has LGTM’ed it
• TLS in core still remains a goal for the next release cycle. Crypt::OpenSSL3 might now be in a complete enough state to support a minimal viable product “https” client to be built on top of it, that could be used by an in-core CPAN client

[P5P posting of this summary]

Download from the usual place, my Wiki Haven.

I've released a new version of SBOM::CycloneDX with support for the OWASP CycloneDX 1.7 specification (ECMA-424).

This release includes the new elements introduced in 1.7, with a focus on:

• Enhancements to Cryptography Bill of Materials (CBOM)
• Citations: references and sources for evidence/metadata
• Intellectual Property Transparency: references to associated patents (number, jurisdiction, link, assignee) for compliance / due diligence needs

New experimental "SBOM::CycloneDX::Lite" interface: A lightweight module designed to generate BOMs with a simpler API, using the most common CycloneDX properties.

Examples included in the distribution (use them as a starting point to build your own applications/tools that generate BOM files):

• "x509-to-cbom" : generates a CBOM from an X.509 certificate
• "rpm-to-sbom" : generates a SBOM from installed RPM packages (on RHEL-based)

The goal of this module is to help the Perl community generate BOM files more easily, improving security and compliance across the ecosystem and making the software supply chain more transparent.

SBOM::CycloneDX is available on CPAN / MetaCPAN: https://metacpan.org/pod/SBOM::CycloneDX

Related projects: - App::CPAN::SBOM - https://metacpan.org/dist/App-CPAN-SBOM - Modules::CoreList::SBOM - https://github.com/giterlizzi/perl-Module-CoreList-SBOM

We are proud to have the support of vitroconnect.

vitroconnect implementiert Schnittstellen und Geschäftsprozesse für eine Reihe von marktführenden Unternehmen über die eigene Brokerage Plattform. Darüber hinaus können auch frei konfigurierbare White Label Bündelprodukte geliefert werden. Seit 2011 ist vitroconnect mit seinen Kund:innen aus der Telekommunikation gewachsen:​ Auf der vitroconnect Plattform werden aktuell über 100 Partner verwaltet.​ vitroconnect ist die größte netzunabhängige Brokerage-Plattform​ für TK-Breitbandanschlüsse in Deutschland.

All of us were present.

• We discussed the recent p5p thread about the proposed class :abstract attribute. Paul wants to write that because it’s a simple addition on current code and avoids design complications about roles. Aristotle doesn’t wish to introduce a new special-purpose feature now that will become redundant when a more general one is available later and wondered whether it can be introduced as roles that currently only support a small subset of features. No call has been made.
• The class discussions also extended to looking at the meta module and API, and the common idea between the two that it would be useful to get more people to use them and discuss future ideas. We would like people to step forward here.
• We have PR #24059 to implement the retraction of the deprecation of being able to call undefined import methods (and the reinstatement of a default-enabled warning for that case), thanks to haarg. We are keen to get it merged so we will provide feedback soon.
• The maint-votes process came up. We pondered whether we can conceive of something less obscure and will post to the list about this.

[P5P posting of this summary]

An Analysis of The Perl and Raku Foundation's 2024 Finances

In October 2024, I published an article analyzing the financial situation of The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF). Since then, I have left the board, and my life is now largely unrelated to Perl. I no longer have insight into TPRF's internal decision-making but I got a few suggestions to continue, so this article again analyzes TPRF's finances using publicly available data for the 2024 calendar year. There is an unavoidable delay between when nonprofit tax returns are filed and when they become public.

Executive Summary

• Assets at end of 2023: $200,215
• Revenue in 2024: $86,845
• Expenses in 2024: $188,037
• Assets at end of 2024: $101,525

Revenue: A Positive Turn

(cross-posted from my blog)

Last Monday I did the Perl Developer Release of Perl 5.43.7. As usual, I worked from the Release Managers Guide . Everything worked well, even if everything was cutting it a bit close. My video setup on the desktop was not suited for streaming anymore, so I had to do a stream consisting only of the console window and me talking over it, and no floating head of me available.

What worked well

The Twitch chat was the most active that I witnessed when streaming a Perl release. We chatted about organizing Perl conferences and also the Perl release process. One realization for me was that the RMG process is mostly there to exercise the Perl build machinery and testing that the generated tarball does not have deficiencies. This means that testing that Perl can build through Configure is important, but testing different Perl configurations like ithreads or userelocatableinc is not that important.