After skipping a week again due to circumstances, all three of us attended this shorter meeting, which Paul had to leave early.
We went over a number of pending administrative requests, including possible additions to the core team and the process to follow for this.
We reviewed issue #24013 about the fallout of fatalizing calls to undefined import/unimport methods with arguments. We decided that this deprecation be rescinded and the PR be reverted. This mistake should only warn, with a category to make it easily usably fatalizable (so that whoever wants the error can opt into it).
In my previous post, in February, I announced the overhaul of the MailBox software. The MailBox suite of distributions implement automatic email handling processes. I started development back in 1999, so it had aged a bit. And I can now proudly tell you that the work has been completed!
As you may have experienced yourself: software ages. It's not directly that it does not work anymore, however your own opinion about programming, the features of the language and libraries you use, and the source specifications keep on changing. Basic maintenance picks some of the low-hanging fruits as refreshment, but you usually stay away from major rewrites. Well, the marvelous NLnet Foundation helped me to realize just that!
A working link for Tom Christiansen's slides on "Unicode, The Good, the Bad, and the (mostly) Ugly" is at https://web.archive.org/web/20121224081332/http://98.245.80.27/tcpc/OSCON2011/gbu.html. (We are writing a book on debugging at home, and I needed a usable link to Tom's talk.)
It is an unfortunate fact of life reflected in the stages of man, that
we start off facing problems looking to others to solve these problems.
Later we learn to solve these problems ourselves, we teach others to do the
same. After that we delegate problem solving to those we have taught
but find that as our own capacity diminishes, those that come after us
simply ask an AI to do that which we struggled to learn in the past. A
steady spiral ensuring future humanity’s cognitive decline, fuelled by
the genius of its ancestors. We had become masters of our destiny
only to hand it over to machines, because we hope machines will do it
better. Perhaps they will.
I was on the schedule for 2025, but by swapping the release version, I skipped doing a release in 2025. This year, I'm doing the dev release live stream again on Twitch, for version 5.43.7.
And again, you can watch it live on Monday 19th of January on Twitch.
You can expect to watch me talk through the steps of the Perl
Release Managers Guide and if you join the Twitch chat, or
p5p on irc.perl.org, we can chat a bit.
I assume I'll start Monday at 16:00 UTC (17:00 CET), and the whole thing will
take around 4 hours unless there are some major mishaps. In the middle, I'll join a call of the organizers of the German Perl Workshop 2026 in Berlin, where we will likely go through organizing the social event and the pre-conference meeting.
The stars aligned and all three of us managed to get together.
We mostly talked about PPCs, both in the general shape of the process, and specifically the latest proposal, PPC0034.
Given how the PPC process has worked out in practice, we discussed how much sense it makes and whether it solves a problem we actually have. We agreed that the steering council - and Perl overall - would still benefit from having some sort of declared process by which people can suggest and discuss new features, as separate from implementing them.
The process at the moment doesn’t align very well with existing practice; at the same time, existing practice is not particularly structured. Rather than trying to define a new process, we think it better to clarify the documented process to more obviously match what we actually do, and try to iterate that way.
PPC0034 is concerned with refalias parameters in signatures. Both the refalias and declared_refs features are still currently marked as experimental, though it is not immediately clear in their overview tickets why. We should clarify the status of these before we fully commit to PPC0034.
That aside, the overall document of PPC0034 seems good and we’re happy to merge it as a basis for ongoing experiment and a trial implementation.
We're really excited about this line up. We've got some well know returning speakers and some very exciting new contributors. This is a hybrid conference, we encourage local and remote attendees and speakers/contributors to participate.
A plenv plugin to show which Perl versions have a particular module.
I use plenv daily to manage the many Perl configurations which I use for different projects. Sometimes I have to install huge collections of Perl modules for some specific use case. And then I forget which Perl installation under plenv it was where I installed them.
So I wrote this plugin to fix that.
Example use cases:
$ plenv where Dist::Zilla
5.24.4
5.28.2
5.34.1-dzil
5.39.2
It can also report the actual path and/or the module version:
The refalias draft PPC on the mailing list is looking good. We encourage Gianni to turn it into a full PPC doc PR
We still would like more automation around making real CPAN distributions out of dist/ dirs. Paul will write an email requesting assistance on that subject specifically
Briefly discussed the subject of the meta module handling signatures with named parameters. Further discussion will continue on the email thread.
When we publish our Perl module repository on GitHub, we might notice something peculiar in the "About"
section of our repository: GitHub doesn't recognize the Perl 5 license. This can be a bit
confusing, especially when we've explicitly stated the licensing in our LICENSE file.
Without properly defined license, GitHub ranks the quality of a repository lower. This is also unfortunate because it limits the "searchability" of our repository. GitHub cannot index it according to the license and users cannot search by license. This is today more important than ever before as many enterprises rule out open source projects purely on the grounds that their license is poorly managed.
The Problem: Two Licenses in One File
The standard Perl 5 license, as used by many modules, is a dual license: Artistic License (2.0) and GNU
General Public License (GPL) version 1 or later. Often, this is included in a single LICENSE file
in the repository root.
The tech world changes quickly, but some tools stand the test of time. Perl is one of them — a programming language that quietly powers countless systems behind the scenes. While the spotlight often falls on Python or Go, Perl continues to run financial systems, automate infrastructure, and parse massive data sets.
In 2025, Perl developers are still in demand. But finding the right opportunity requires more than typing a keyword into a job board. It’s about understanding where Perl fits today, who needs it most, and how to present yourself as the professional that businesses can rely on.
1. Understand Where Perl Is Thriving
To begin your job search, you first need to understand where Perl is alive and kicking. Contrary to the outdated belief that it’s a “legacy” language, Perl is still critical in several industries.
Finance and banking – Many risk analysis and trading systems were built on Perl decades ago and still rely on it for their daily operations.
Get them from the usual place.
And no, I have still not had time to update CPAN::MetaCustodian so that it properly parses these wikis. But that time is approaching...
The newly-added signature_named_parameters experiment needs adding to perlexperiment.pod, and experimental.pm. Hopefully before 5.43.5 release on Thursday
The experimental dist would be easier to manage if it lived in dist/, but it would also be nice if we had more automated tooling to create real CPAN distribution tarballs out of those directories. Would help for making Module-Corelist updates every month as well.
We await a full write-up of a PPC document following on from the “refalias in signatures” Pre-PPC discussion
wir laden Euch herzlich ein
zum Deutschen Perl/Raku Workshop 2026.
Der Workshop findet nächstes Jahr vom Montag 16. März bis
Mittwoch 18. März in der Heilandskirche in Berlin. statt.
Die Webseite und der Call for Papers sind bereits online. Wir freuen uns auf viele interessante
Vorträge!
Über Unterstützung durch Sponsoren freuen wir uns immer. Wenn Ihr bzw. Eure
Firma den Workshop unterstützen möchtet, wendet Euch gerne an uns. Wir finden gemeinsam sicher eine Möglichkeit!
Wenn Ihr Fragen an die Organisatoren habt, erreicht Ihr uns am besten
direkt unter orga2026@german-perl-workshop.de .
Wir freuen uns auf Eure Teilnahme,
Max Maischein für die Organisatoren und Frankfurt.pm
Wir arbeiten noch an
Hotelempfehlungen und veröffentlichen diese auf der Webseite.
---
Hello everybody,
we cordially invite you
to the German Perl/Raku Workshop 2026.
The workshop will take place next year from Monday 16th March to
Wednesday 18th March in the Heilandskirche in Berlin..
The website and the call for papers are already online.
We are looking forward to many interesting
presentations!
