I released perl 5.13.10 today. I might write more about that later. But one significant change in it is that Perl now has many more regex flags.

So I wrote a short one-off script to find out what words I cound construct from the flags.

Now it just gives you one word that contains as many of the flags as possible, and gives you the remainder. What would be more interesting would be to detect cases where multiple valid words can be made from the flags. E.g. "mix" and "uploads". It just detected that by accident.

I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

I have an RFC patch series to Git to add gettext localization support to it. So that eventually you'll be able to configure Git to e.g. shout error messages at you in German. Won't that be a nice variant of the current abuse? I think so.

Here's the latest version of the patch series I posted to the Git mailing list.

For the Perl side of things (Git is partially implemented in Perl) I'm using libintl-perl's Locale::Messages. It was very pleasant to work with it. I wonder why more Perl projects don't use it instead of Perl-y libraries like Locale::Maketext.

Maybe it's just the GNU gettext dependency they're trying to get rid of, although libintl-perl includes a Pure-Perl version of the tools it provides .mo, so probably not.

Actually the way most open source projects do localization is "not at all". I don't blame them, I certainly can't be bothered most of the time. But I wonder to what degree we're losing potential users & contributors because of this.

There was a recent-ish study of social networks on GitHub where it was evident that a lot of Japanese Perl users had formed a social-ghetto amongst themselves. I've seen a few trending Perl repositories that only have README files in Japanese.

Maybe better localization tools - and most of all - a commitment to use them would help to bridge some of that.

Since 5.12 got released a lot of bugfixes have been flowing into blead and one new feature. The prctl() support for $0 that I previously blogged about just got commited by Steffen Mueller.

With this patch you can finally killall programs you write in perl on Linux without killing all of your perl processes indiscriminately.