I generally have no problem understanding what's in a CPAN distribution and why, but lately (for years, now), it seems that tools are building files that I don't know about. Is there a canonical place to find information about what absolutely, definitely needs to be in a CPAN distribution? I generally rely on my tools to do this stuff for me, but honestly, what's META.json, MYMETA.json, META.yml,MYMETEA.yaml? And then I wind up with files like MANIFEST.bak and MANIFEST.SKIP.bak and I honestly don't know the format of many of these files, why they're duplicated or where to look up this information. Which of these files should I commit to source control and which of these files should git ignore?
It's an embarrassment because honestly, I should know this stuff, but I don't. Surely there's a place where I can find all of this explained at once, perhaps in conjunction with a description of the files in my .cpan, .cpanm directories?
Most of you love programming and shut ears when its only starts to buzzing anywhere but please hold on, its for a good cause and maybe even you might benefit from it.
Assuming someone would like to help with Windows, how could he generate a list of modules that are especially problematic on Windows?
Is there a way to fetch all the distributions that have no successful test reports on Windows?
Is there a way to create the ratio of (failed test reports)/(all test reports) on MSWin32 for each distribution, and then show the top 100 of that list?
Tomorrow is the 25th birthday of Perl. The Perl programming language.
When I've first heard about it, it was named PERL, the spelling that now is a nice indicator of awareness in the row with Perl and perl. Honestly, I never thought of Perl as of a practical extracting and reporting language, I simply had no clue about which reports and which extractions were mentioned in that definition.
I have first seen the name of the language on the book covers in a book shop in my home town years ago. I cannot tell you when exactly, but it was definitely before 1998. At that time it was only something related to web and programming for me.
Perl is not my first programming language. The first one was C++ (with ++ from the start), and I still find it one of the best languages and tend to use it as soon as there's a small need.
OK, so I decided to hack in support for submitting CPAN testers reports into cpanminus. I've uploaded the result to CPAN in case anybody else wants to use it. After CPANPLUS and cpanminus, the logical name for it was cpantimes.
As a Perl programmer on Windows, I've often had moments of supreme frustration. I can't use SSH or SFTP from Perl, and I can't use some of the mail handling modules. When I got started back in the early years of the century, I couldn't even use CPAN; I had to compile my own Perl and accept the fact that tests just mostly had no chance of working. Over the past year or two, however, especially as I've come to rely on CPANtesters for my own modules, I've started to realize that one reason for this is the lack of dense testing of modules on Windows. (Yeah, Paul Evans had something to do with that realization, too.)
But then Gábor Szabó posted on Google+ that he hoped to make it to #20 on the Windows smoke tester leaderboard. (As of today, he's at #19 - congrats!)
A few times every month someone asks me how is it to work at booking.com. People know that I worked there some time ago and they tend to gather more information about the company in which they are going to be interviewed for a position of a developer.
The dates before the 21 December 2012 are the best ones to stop thinking about the company where I spent 1.5 years. Although both booking.com and I are strongly related to the Perl programming language and its community, the text below the cut-line is not about any technical issue in Perl, but is about the way booking.com stops the contracts with their employees. I intentionally use the feature of MovableType that allows splitting the abstract and the body. So, please do not read further if you don't want to read things that are there.
In this article, we'll develop a basic search application using Dancer and
Sphinx. Sphinx is an open source search engine
that's fairly easy to use, but powerful enough to be deployed in high-traffic
sites, such as Craigslist and Dailymotion.
In keeping with this year's Dancer Advent Calendar trend, the example app will
be built on Dancer 2, but it should work just as well with Dancer 1.
This week I didn't fix the countdown week counter but I think I will do it next time. This week Viacheslav (vti) was negotiating the contract with the venue, and I am happy to tell you that he managed to save a few thousand euros by reorganising the room configuration that was initially proposed. We did not lose any space, and we still have the big and nice concert hall, so no worries. Huge thanks to vti! We hope to sign the contract next week.
It is very likely that we will have no extra paid classes around the conference. But still, if you are reading this and would like to give a class, please contact us.
I finally sat down and organized my unsorted bookmarks in Firefox. In doing so I came across Jeff Atwood's blog post describing the FizzBuzz test:
Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz".
I must have bookmarked the link while preparing for interviews before graduation. After skimming over the material I was curious to know the smallest amount of Perl code I could use to write a solution.
Here's my attempt:
Any shorter solutions? I suppose I could just use print if I wanted a one-liner...
The other day Andy Lester posed a question Where can someone find Perl modules to contribute to? My first answer was to look at the dists with the most bugs. I continued thinking about it, wondering how you could identify a module that is ripe for help.
This post outlines my next idea, and the top 20 dists based on my first implementation.
If your website is powered by Joomla! but you want to display your PHPUnit HTML coverage results like the rest of the webpages, you can stick the coverage results in a subdirectory of images, like http://developer.example.com/images/coverage/.
I haven't tried it, but I expect this trick would work for other CMS-driven sites.
A little confession/reasoning/backstory: I love CPAN surfing. You know, watching the latest releases, browsing module dependencies and other modules by the same authors... And favoriting the interesting stuff. Stats show that I'm not supposed to be the only one. If so, wouldn't it be nice to provide a crowdsourced recommendation for CPAN modules? Think: "People who favorite Mojolicious often favorite: AnyEvent, Data::Printer, Devel::NYTProf, Dist::Zilla...". Plus, given the user's favorites, own releases & own release dependencies, a custom-tailored module suggestion list could be build for any PAUSE ID subscribed to the MetaCPAN. Enter the CPAN::U experiment.
November turned out to be a very eventful and productive month. Aside from various code updates with some CPAN-Testers distributions, including porting many of the tests to Test::Database, and discovering the usefulness of Test::Trap for testing some of the scripts, we also got a handle on the missing reports. For the past few months, questions about missing reports has increased. Back in August I started to look at a more thorough catch-up. After some suggestions and ideas from David and Andreas, I also added some to code to collect data in a similar way to the tail log. As a consequence of the tail parsing, the improved catch-up code and the rewritten generate code, it now means that not only have we caught up, but we now have a much more robust mechanism in place to ensure we're not missing any reports.
