blogs.perl.org

A few weeks ago a casual exchange occured on irc... I might as well quote it rather than paraphrase:

I'd like to make an announcement: after some serious thought, I decided that from now on, being a software developer (which I am not too bad at) will only be the means (but the absolutely necessary ones) to me being a writer / entertainer / philosopher / Internet celebrity (a little bit of all those and then some) whose main pride and passion is his personal web site, which is full of a lot of material, and various pages and material is constantly added to it.

Oracle is closing down the opensolaris.org site on March 24th, which is inconvenient for the rest of us. I wanted to grab the mailman archives for the mailing lists so I fired up a search engine and looked for any existing open source projects to do this. After trying two different scripts that did not quite work right I realized it would just be faster for me to write what I need.

I started by fetching the listinfo page which has links to all the lists archived and took a look at the data. Based on the page structure the easiest method was to iterate over all the links in the page and only go deeper if it lead to a mailing list's main page. On the mailing list page I follow the link to the archives page. Then just scan all the links in the page for .gz files and download them. WWW::Mechanize provides a save_content() function which handles saving the files locally with minimal effort. That was all it took.

Optimization

....Or, this entry is better titled as "Use cpanfile, and make sure to add it to your repository"

UPDATE: read miyagawa's comment (note, this linked comment has the summary, but make sure to read the others), and his blog post please.

This is a tongue-in-cheek addendum to being able to do `cpanm $git_url` described in "Dont' release experiments to CPAN".

The truth is "no, I really don't think there's a problem with CPAN modules github", but I do think you could make life easier for people trying to do `cpanm $git_url`.

Namely: use cpanfile and cpanm 1.6, which supports

1. build_requires / configure_requires equivalent, and
2. version range specification, including exact version match, not "at least version X"

Some interesting stuff has been said today on The Four Major Problems with CPAN, Don't release experiments to CPAN and CPAN is for experimentation and I hope that never changes.

If you haven't read these posts yet, I encourage you to do so. They've all got interesting things to say.

(As an aside, let me say that I think PAUSE authors could probably participate more on PrePAN. I've posted a few things there and found it quite helpful. Even if your module is already on CPAN and you just want feedback on it, post something on PrePAN. I've found the discussion to be of a good quality and actually quite positive.)

I'm proposing an explicit community convention where experimental code isn't released to CPAN, but is shared on github, perhaps with an associated blog post, or discussion on PrePAN.

This addresses just one of CPAN's problems, which have also been raised today by Brendan Byrd.

First of all, I love CPAN. CPAN was the first of its kind, to provide an extensive and official library of modules that support the language itself. CPAN is very much a part of Perl as much as regular expressions are. Without CPAN, Perl would never be as versatile or useful as it exists now.

But, CPAN is also very old. It's been around since late 1995, almost 20 years now. As such, it has grown to house many thousands of modules, 119,124 to be exact (as of today). Many would consider that virtue, as you can find almost anything you want on CPAN. However, it betrays a underlying problem with CPAN that only increases with age:

A hundred thousand modules is too much stuff to sift through.

Although YAPC::Europe::2013 preparations are well underway in Kiev, it is time for the venue committee of the YAPC::Europe Foundation (YEF) to think about the location of the 2014 conference. YAPC::Europe wouldn't exist without dedicated teams of volunteers, and we are always excited to see the enthusiasm and learn about the new ideas the community has to offer.

Further information about preparing a complete application can be found at http://www.yapceurope.org/organizers/index.html . Proposals submitted to the venue committee will be added to this public repository (you may provide private information separately) to benefit future organizers.

The deadlines which apply to this portion of the procedure are:

• Saturday, 13 April: Deadline for sending a letter of intent. This letter simply expresses interest in hosting the conference and provides contact information (both email and telephone) for at least two organizers. This is an optional step but it can be to your advantage to alert the venue committee of your proposal.
• Thursday, 27 June: Deadline for sending proposals to host YAPC::Europe 2014.

If you do not receive a confirmation for your letter of intent or proposal within a couple of days, please personally contact a member of the venue committee.

Please send your questions, letters of intent, and proposals to venue@yapceurope.org.

A couple of weeks ago I asked for a show of hands to gather interest in restarting the Thames Valley Perl Mongers. The positive response we received is an encouraging sign that TVPMs are still out there (at least 30 of you) and interested in meeting up!

The meeting will be held on Wednesday 20th March at 7pm, and for this first occasion we hope to have two talks with a short break.

The venue is Reading Enterprise Centre on the University of Reading main campus. Refreshments and light snacks will kindly be provided on the evening by our hosts, Opsview:

http://www.readingenterprisecentre.com/#/location
http://www.opsview.com/

Please confirm your interest in attending by dropping a note to peter.finnan@opsview.com, including your full name (required for access to the building). If you wish to volunteer a talk of up to 25 minutes, please also provide a summary and the title.

I also urge you to join our mailing list to keep up to date with this and future plans:

http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/thamesvalley-pm

Looking forward to seeing you on the 20th!

I used to work with DBIx::Class::Schema::Versioned to upgrade my DBIC Schema but soon I needed more then it offered.

Starting with DBIx::Class::DeploymentHandler was a bit troublesome because I had a hard-ish time understanding the extensive documentation.

Now that I moved past that phase I want to present my way of using DeploymentHandler and hopefully spare you some of the burden.

Note: I write my DBIC schema resultclasses by hand and deploy to whatever database system I need.

Feature list * each schema version should be installable to a clean/empty database * single step upgrades of schema versions * create pl scripts that do something on the schema before and/or after upgrade

Let's try to predict when we will be able to {conveniently,realistically,sensibly} use Perl 6 to build real-world applications. Note: this post is just the result of its author's pondering and is not meant to be negative towards Perl 6.

Jenkins - is well known continues integration server. One of it's great features - one may extend it by writing custom plug-ins. Recently I have create one plug-in to build and make distributive of perl applications.

It implements standard build scheme:

1. look up source directory
2. install dependencies into local directory
3. create distributive

Other features are:

1. find 'tagged' directory with maximum version number ( implementing install from subversion tags )
2. applying different patches (install other cpan modules)
3. color output
4. ... and some others

For now it's only Module::Build compatible.

Links:
1. perl-plugin on github
2. link to install

I've published a review of CPAN modules that (can) load other modules. I started making this list of modules when looking at modules for getting dependency information: one class of such modules parse code looking for things that signify a dependency, either implicitly or explicitly.

New York Perlmongers held a successful hackathon this past weekend at an event hosted by Rubenstein Tech in lower Manhattan. By our count, at least 24 people participated, coming from as far away as Harrisburg PA and eastern Connecticut.. Participants ranged from people making their first contributions to Perl-related open source software projects to current and former Perl 5 release managers and pumpkings. Every participant contributed, in part or in whole, to at least one patch to an open source project. When all patches are applied, at least six people will have made their first contributions to the Perl 5 core distribution. Other projects receiving contributions included HTTP::Tiny, Term::Readline::Perl, Module::Metadata and Catalyst, along with more streamlined procedures for creation of .rpm files for CPAN distributions and improvements in PAUSE, the Perl Authors Upload Server.

Special thanks go to Jaron Rubenstein of Rubenstein Tech — they’re hiring! — and the five other Rubenstein staffers who participated in the hackathon.

OK, so sometimes you decide you're going to stop using some module X, maybe because something better has come along. Let's say I want to track down all my CPAN modules that use Any::Moose because my goal is to port each of them to either Moose or Moo.

MetaCPAN has all the dependency information, but I don't want to click through each of my distributions. Enter the MetaCPAN API...

I have enjoyed actively participating in the Los Angeles Perl Mongers and Thousand Oaks Perl Mongers groups, but recently relocated to Salt Lake City, UT. So, what stands between Salt Lake City and a Perl Mongers group? You (you know who you are). Anyone interested in participating in a Perl Mongers group in Salt Lake City, please follow-up here or get in touch with me via email.

A request has been submitted to the folks at pm.org for a mailing list, a pm.org hosted site, and a link to the main pm.org map page. Since those nuts and bolts are fastened by volunteers it takes awhile. But we don't have to wait. The time to start organizing something is now.

Perl Mongers groups provide excellent opportunities to get to know others in the local Perl community, to introduce newcomers to Perl's many ways to do it, to learn, to share, and to socialize.

Just a little note to announce the release of Galileo version 0.023. Galileo is my CMS that aims to be 100% CPAN installable, all you have to do is this:

$ cpanm Galileo
$ galileo setup
$ galileo daemon

This release makes installing even better, because now when you run galileo setup you get a web interface to configure your CMS and then install the database!

Ok that image is just slightly ahead of what is now on CPAN, but its close :-)

We are proud to announce the full schedule of talks at Swiss Perl Workshop 1. As you'll see,
there is a very interesting range of speakers and topics through the day.

:m)

Thanks to our sponsors:
www.perl-magazin.de | www.oetiker.ch | www.leanux.ch | www.booking.com | www.oreilly.de

There are a few small and big things that we did last week for the conference. Let us tell you about them.

First of all, we signed a contract with the river cruise boat and are thinking now of the best possible route so that we can both see the incredible Kiev landscape from water and have enough time for the social part on board. Also, we are working on the buffet menu. All in all, the cruise is going to be an amazing conference experience. Just take a look at their official video.

Let us also remind that less than a month is left until the Early Bird price expires. If you buy a ticket today, you can save 18% of its price. This is only possible before 1 April.