Find out all about CVE and how we deal with it in Perl.
Please checkout the post for more information:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/cve-in-perl

Lots has been going on. All of us showed up, though Aristotle had to join late and Philippe had to leave early, so the meeting was short but productive:

• We continued with the potential release blocker issue review and finished going over all 49 issues remaining at this time, of which we identified 11 of interest. There are now still 72 pull requests to review.
• We agreed to include the new Perl logo in the next release, but don’t yet know exactly how and where. That should be sorted out on p5p, and we will kick that off soon.
• We went over the latest point release news, where everything is finally on track. It is coming very soon.

[P5P posting of this summary]

sub some_field : lvalue { state $value = 'some_default' }

(We know, of course, that “class data” is OOPese for “global variable”.)

Herewith V 1.24

Cheers

Cellgraph 0.7 is out. (I introduced it here and there.) And I will tell you about the great new features in the next paragraph and how it helps you to play with logical structures and deepen your understanding of them. But first please let me mention the why!

The three of us attended.

• Preparations for the point release are now in full swing.
• In relation to that, we ran into infrastructure permissions discrepancies that have cropped up due to an absence of onboarding/offboarding procedures. We need to address both the immediate and long-term issues here.
• We started winnowing this release cycle’s issues for potential release blockers. Out of about 95 issues, we have so far reviewed half, of which we identified 8 of interest. Additionally there are 72 pull requests to review.

[P5P posting of this summary]

An introduction to newbie in Perl.
Please checkout the post for more information:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/welcome-to-perl

Originally published at dev.to

In a previous blog post, I explored the modern way to write CGI scripts using frameworks like Mojolicious. But as pointed out in comments, despite the many benefits, there is one critical problem: when you actually need to deploy to a regular CGI server, where the scripts will be loaded each time and not persisted, frameworks designed for persistent applications add lots of overhead to each request.

CGI scripts have historically been written using the CGI module (or even more ancient libraries). But this module is bulky, crufty, and has serious design issues that led to it being removed from Perl core.

I just needed a few rows of UUIDs in a column of a spreadsheet, more for esthetics than anything else. uuidgen to the rescue.

At the time I didn't realize that uuidgen natively supports outputting multiple ids like so

uuidgen -C 8

The truly lazy path would have been to read the fine uuidgen manual.

Alas, supposing I needed to make multiple calls to uuidgen, I went with a Perl one-liner with a loop, as I couldn't recall the Bash loop syntax.

Here comes the laziness... I I didn't want to write something like this:

perl -e 'print `uuidgen` for @{[1..5]}';

I'm not so found of of perl's de-reference syntax these days, also that array reference/range was giving "the ick" as my kids would say. I needed something lazier, cleaner. I wondered if there were any default/exported arrays available to me that don't have too many elements to them.... Ah, I know!

All three were present.

• We went over developments on the point release front. Things are now finally moving, if slowly.
• We discussed some internal quality-of-life improvements to the PSC meeting workflow.
• We briefly reflected on our work as the PSC given our various personal circumstances this year.
• We discussed PPC 0027 (any/all), prompted by the Mojolicious::Lite DSL question. We went over its status, how the work got merged, and current issues with the design. We confirmed an already possible technical solution to the Mojolicious issue and agreed that it satisfies us for now, but we still intend to pick up the further issues at a later time.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Sie bieten, wir catchen!
nicsell ist ein Domain-Backorder-Dienst, auch Dropcatcher genannt, der es Ihnen ermöglicht, auf eine Vielzahl freiwerdender Domains zu bieten, die sich aktuell in der Löschungsphase befinden.
Schon ab einem geringen Startgebot von 10 € können Sie an unseren Auktionen teilnehmen und haben die Chance an Ihre Wunschdomain zu gelangen.
Übrigens: Zur Verstärkung unseres Teams in Osnabrück suchen wir engagierte Perl-Entwickler (m/w/d). Bei Interesse freuen wir uns auf Ihre Bewerbung!

Nicsell

This is a continuation of a series of articles about how to write XS libraries that are more convenient and foolproof for the Perl users, while not blocking them from using the actual C API.

If you spot anything wrong, or want to contribute suggestions, open an issue at the GitHub repo

Wrapping Transient Objects

One frequent and difficult problem you will encounter when writing XS wrappers around a C library is what to do when the C library exposes a struct which the user needs to see, but the lifespan of that struct is controlled by something other than the reference the user is holding onto.

Available now: Perl.Wiki.html V 1.23.

As from today, when I announce a new version of one of my TiddlyWikis, I'll list the 2 most recent parts of the change log. These are just copies of the most recent parts of the para called VersionInfo.

And why 2 parts? To help those who missed the last announcement.

o Author:
- Ron Savage
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- http://savage.net.au
- https://symboliciq.au
- https://quantumiq.au
- https://metacpan.org/author/RSAVAGE

o version:
- Perl extension for Version Objects
- https://metacpan.org/dist/versionhttps://metacpan.org/dist/version

We didn’t have a meeting last week. This week, everyone was here.

• We briefly talked about builtin. We think a numify function is quite necessary.
• We started reviewing release blockers for v5.42.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Handling of undef / false default values in Perl v5.38
Please checkout the post for more information:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/subroutine-signatures

Hi there!

Recently I tried this port of turbovision and was really impressed by it.

Now I want it to be available for Perl and in progress of coding it.
The progress is happening here

The progress is happening at a moderate pace.
Currently this runs okay on windows, and should also be okay everywhere else (not tested)

Lots of progress is done already.
Lots of work needs to be done.
I think I've crossed an imaginary equator recently and expect it to be finished in a month or two.
Please let me know here about your ideas, so I could add to the module.

PS.
This post is a slight misuse of the "blogs.perl.org" resource, because I want to create some small corner for developers discussion about it, so I am doing an attempt to invite interested people comment about development here.

• wiki
• discord
• please let me know what else

I had written a Math paper which was not good enough to be published in a journal, yet I wanted to have proof of the date I wrote it on so I could post the paper on the web without other people later being able to question who first came up with the idea.

The way I thought was more correct to do this was to publish the paper's sha256 checksum on the Bitcoin blockchain. Posting the SHA on social media (such as x.com) was not enough, as paid members can edit their old posts.

I got in touch with BBRTJ, the maintainer of Bitcoin::Crypto, who was very helpful in teaching me how to use his module and achieving my aim.

The goal, he told me, was to include the SHA256 checksum as the comment (technically the 'NULLDATA') of a small bitcoin transaction.

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.

Environment variable PERL_RAND_SEED in Perl v5.38
Please checkout the post for more information:
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/random-in-perl

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.