BooK

After a three years pandemic-induced hiatus, it is my pleasure to announce that the Perl Toolchain Summit is happening again!

This year, for the thirteenth edition, we will be gathering again in Lyon, from Wednesday April 27 to Sunday April 30 2023, in the hotel Campanile Lyon Centre Part-Dieu. Participants will stay at the hotel, and work in the meeting rooms dedicated for the event.

The first rounds of invitations have been sent. We plan on having about thirty participants. We are always looking for sponsors (ask for our sponsor prospectus!).

The following code is using a widespread Perl idiom, taking advantage of features designed for one-liners:

my $content = do { local ( @ARGV, $/ ) = ("$file"); <> };

Another trick here is the array assignment, which slurps all elements of the list into @ARGV, leaving $/ to undef; that way, the diamond operator will read the entire file at once.

I've been using and publicizing this local @ARGV idiom for years. And I've spent several days last week chasing a bug caused by this line of code.

Wallflower is my static website generator. Well, not really: it's actually generating a static version of any Plack application, provided it behaves reasonably when seen as a static site.

(Read on, I'm asking for help towards the end!)

Get the lead developers together in a hotel for four days. Remove all distractions. Feed them. Stand back and watch bugs get fixed, problems get solved, and new ideas implemented.

Earlier this month 38 Perl toolchain developers assembled in Lyon for the Perl Toolchain Summit, the event previously known as the QA Hackathon. This is an annual gathering where we pull together the lead developers of the core systems and tools in the CPAN ecosystem. We aim to provide an environment where for four days they can work on the tools we all rely on, with the right people around them.

This blog post is a summary of the summit. We can't cover everything, but our goal is to give you a flavour of the work that went on, and hopefully get across why the attendees typically rate this as their favourite event to attend. You can read more of the individual accomplishments on the results page of the event wiki.

A few weeks ago, SROMANOV sent me a patch for Git::Database adding initial support for accessing the Git object database references via Git::Raw. He had already contributed a partial implementation for a Git::Wrapper backend some time ago.

This motivated me to explore that module further, and implement the methods that were missing from Sergey's patch. So I asked JACQUESG to implement a few features that I needed. He was amazingly fast at responding, and I found myself asking for more and more features. And he just kept adding them!

So, thanks to a motivated contributor and a very reactive maintainer, Git::Database 0.08 can now access data from a Git repository using any of these seven Perl Git backends:

• Git::Repository
• Git::Wrapper
• Git::Raw
• Git
• Git::Sub
• Git::PurePerl (missing support for writing refs)
• Cogit (missing support for writing refs)

There are in fact more Git backends on CPAN... Anyone interested in adding support for Git::Class must have understood by now that patches are welcome. :-)

Update: I my praise for contributors, I forgot SREZIC, who not only runs a smoker, but tirelessy reports all failures back to the author, usually with some analysis that puts me on the track for a fix. Version 0.009 is on CPAN thanks to him.

This round of applause would not be complete without DOLMEN who spent a lot of time helping me design the module's interface. I have already mentioned his role in a previous post.

All the module issues come from me, and these people helped make it much much better than I could have on my own.