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My first go at this was with Dr Forr, my long time Perl mentor and friend. While working together we convinced the boss, his brother, to open up our office as a lab for a series of open to the public classes, more or using the same format and overarching plan I've jotted down for this proposed go.

Generally, our focus was Unix and Perl, especially - though not exclusively- for people completely new to programming. Or completely new to computers - it was the '90s. That was a real thing.

Since then, I've resurrected the gist in several forms, to create one-week boot camps for colleagues, for a semester or two with the Minneapolis Community Education program, and so on. Pretty much whenever I can put time, interest and a couple of dozen terminals into the same space I can be counted on to dust off some old example projects for inspiration and dash off a new syllabus.

I often have need to communicate with ISC's BIND programattically and I haven't found any libraries out there to do that.

Often, what you'll see is a wrapper around BIND's rndc utility that forks, execs, passes it arguments, and then parses the output.

This is okay if you're on a box that can fork and has rndc installed, but that's not a safe assumption.

use Net::RNDC;
 
my $rndc = Net::RNDC->new(
  host => '127.0.0.1',
  port => 953,         # Defaults to 953
  key  => 'abcd',
);
 
if (!$rndc->do('status')) {
  die "RNDC failed: " . $rndc->error;
}
 
print $rndc->response;

The base Net::RNDC interface is synchronous, but you can use Net::RNDC::Session asynchronously, or just use Net::RNDC::Packet itself to generate/parse RNDC packets.

The packet interface isn't yet well defined (just read/write entries in a hashref), but I hope to improve on that soon.

Enjoy,

-- Matthew Horsfall (alh)

PS: Thanks to my employer Dyn for allowing us 2 days a month to hack on projects that we want!

As usual TPF just published another call for grant proposals, ranging from $500 to $2000. The official call for proposals is available here: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/01/2013q1-call-for-grant-proposal.html

Barbie recently created a new page listing all the CPAN distributions without a single Test report.
There are 257 distributions with not report at all and there are 3,487 distributions without any report on Windows (Win32).

Given that currently there are 26,547 distributions on CPAN that represents 13% of all the distributions.

Not bad.

Especially if we compare with some of the other platforms:

GNU/Linux 483
Mac OS X 2,662
NetBSD 2,962
Windows (Win32) 3,487
Windows (Cygwin) 9,983
...
AIX 25,500
...

On those pages, there are a couple of possible reasons why these distributions have no reporst, but I wonder, maybe we could track down a small number of distributions that are the dependencies of most of these modules causing the lack of test. Then those could be either fixed or avoided depending on the situation.

Here are the most popular ebooks from Dec 28 2012 to Jan 3 2013:

1. DBI
2. Bread-Board
3. Test-Simple

After more then a year of silence I've managed to resurrect the Debian::Apt::PM and new Perl indexes are available for both i386 and amd64 platforms.

For now the web site can be used to find out if a Perl module is packaged for Debian with which version or not at all. Ex.:

http://deb.perl.it/debian/cpan-deb/#q=CPAN

In the future I can add Ubuntu repositories too, but those are quite huge to process.

Greetings to Perl - Italy and big thank you for providing hostname for this project!

(cross-posted)

[ This is cross-posted from the new home of the Ocean of Awareness blog. ]

Marpa::R2's Scanless interface is now out of beta and available in full release on CPAN. This interface allows Marpa to be used without the need to create a separate lexer (scanner), and increases Marpa's level of "whipitupitude". Here's what a simple calculator looks like in the Scanless interface:

:start ::= Script
Script ::= Expression+ separator => comma action => do_script
comma ~ [,]
Expression ::=
    Number
    | '(' Expression ')' action => do_parens assoc => group
   || Expression '**' Expression action => do_pow assoc => right
   || Expression '*' Expression action => do_multiply
    | Expression '/' Expression action => do_divide
   || Expression '+' Expression action => do_add
    | Expression '-' Expression action => do_subtract
Number ~ [\d]+
 
:discard ~ whitespace
whitespace ~ [\s]+
# allow comments
:discard ~ <hash comment>
<hash comment> ~ <terminated hash comment> | <unterminated
   final hash comment>
<terminated hash comment> ~ '#' <hash comment body> <vertical space char>
<unterminated final hash comment> ~ '#' <hash comment body>
<hash comment body> ~ <hash comment char>*
<vertical space char> ~ [\x{A}\x{B}\x{C}\x{D}\x{2028}\x{2029}]
<hash comment char> ~ [^\x{A}\x{B}\x{C}\x{D}\x{2028}\x{2029}]

I just checked the 1000 most recent CPAN uploads. 504 of them did not have a link to the repository of their source code. I was quite surprised by this. After all we are talking about open source code where having a link to a public version contol system can increase cooperation.

So I put together an article on how to add the repository link to the META files. It is very simple in all the 4 major packaging systems.

I hope this article helps, and more CPAN authors will include this information in their distributions.

(I know that META CPAN just moved, and it might not have been fully updated, but I also checked the number of packages without a license field and it was 169 out of tha 1,000 quite similar to the number I saw a week ago when I wrote about the CPAN uploads without license in the META files. So I think this is quite close to the correct number.)

We are happy to announce Swiss Perl Workshop 1!

The event happens on Friday, 22 March 2013. In Switzerland.

It is a one day workshop, starting approximately at 10 am and ending roughly at 5 pm, followed by a social event.

If you are in the area, please reserve the date and stay tuned for updates. :-)

Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic of the perl5-porters email list. Usually I go Monday to Sunday, but just to keep things tidy, we'll make this the final summary of 2012 by including the 31st.

Topics for this week include:

• cPanel version of "Storable 2.39_01" breaks backwards compatibility
• Please separate fixes to spelling from changes to code layout in patches
• Term::ANSIColor 4.01 released

According to metacpan.org, MooX-ClassAttribute-0.001 was the first upload of 2013! Yay!

[ This is cross-posted from the new home of the Ocean of Awareness blog. ]

In a previous post, I showed a self-parsing grammar, written in Marpa's new BNF interface. That grammar was in a tradition going back to the 70's. Following the tradition, I cheated a bit. That grammar required, but did not include, a lexer to make a prepass over its input.

This post contains a self-parsing and self-lexing grammar, the one for Marpa's forthcoming Scanless interface. This grammar is about as self-contained as a grammar can get, short of being encoded into a Universal Turing machine.

Many readers will prefer to be introduced to the Scanless interface by way of a simpler example, but based on the response to the previous post I know there are others who share my fascination with self-description and self-exemplification. And there is something to be said for reading an example that is a final authority on itself.

This is just a quick note to let everyone know that MetaCPAN is moving to a new hosting sponsor today (Dec 31st). Our old hosting relationship with speedchilli.com has unfortunately come to an end. We've been quite grateful for and more than satisfied with their sponsorship over the last 1.5 years or so. Having the hardware and bandwidth which speedchilli freely made available to us was instrumental in the early days. (Initially everything was running off a tiny instance in the Rackspace cloud. It wasn't much, but it was all we could afford after passing the hat around). Having speedchill sponsor us allowed everyone who contributes to MetaCPAN create something truly special.

Happy New Year! Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic of the perl5-porters email list.

Topics this week include:

• perl 5.17.7 is now available
• Solaris smoke testers wanted
• Parrot 4.11.0 "All together - Happy Birthday Lovebird" Released!
• successful s///e clobbers $! on MSWin32
• JROBINSON grant report, #13
• POSIX wrapper for strptime()
• Is this a known unicode bug in 5.16.2?

Dear readers,

This Sunday post is the last one before the new 2013 year begins. So, a beautiful chance to have an opportunity to list some results that we achieved during the year and share some plans for the next one.

Script: graph-cpan-dists-over-time

One glaring deficiency: does not take PAUSE deletions into account (is there a MetaCPAN API for this?) Thus, the number of actual dists on the graph is monotonically increasing and might be higher than the number of actual dists on CPAN.

Generated graph is still rough and number of authors is limited at three because I'm too lazy to tweak the sample script from Chart::Lines.

Sample graph:
.

Enjoy and feel free to improve on it.

tesing

I just checked the 1000 most recent CPAN uploads and 174 of them did not have a license.That's 17.4%.

According to the history of the metayml_has_license metric of CPANTS, there has been a constant improvement since 2003, but I feel it is still too high.
Especially if you take in account how easy it is to add license to the META files.

What about making a New Year's resolution to add the license key to each one of your modules?

Recently I had to move all my projects to a new server and decided to give Nginx and Starman a chance.

The Nginx config is rather simple.

my Catalyst Application is located at /var/www/MyApp

In response to one of my posts about the Advanced Perl Users Group, @belden asked me how I find LinkedIn useful:

A better LinkedIn makes the world a slightly better place for me. Our ill-defined, disparate, and disperse community has many parts that can be improved and I spend a couple of minutes each morning moderating some LinkedIn stuff. Other people help out in other sites. There are a couple of things that I'd like to encourage.

I want to recruiters to see that CPAN Developer's Group badge and ask candidates why they don't have it. Even if that means the person only ever uploaded one module, that means they've gone through the process once, which I think is the biggest obstacle to sharing. Once they get over that hump, even if just to get the badge, they are a slightly better Perler. And, it's all about a long journey where each step makes them slightly better. If they are hiring better Perlers, I'm dealing with better Perlers when I show up.