August 2012 Archives

Ricardo is pushing for smart match changes.

A long time ago, Ricardo suggested big changes to smart matching. I added my thoughts on how that does not benefit Perl. Now he's pushing for those changes again.

This sort of change should be important to all Perl users. We already have two versions of smart match out there so you have to be careful with your Perl versions. This would add a third. I don't think these changes a…

Should my Perl release process be yours?

Steven asks "What is your release process". I could have buried my thoughts in the comments, but Dean Hampstead suggested it as a topic for the second edition of Mastering Perl. I started to respond there, but that got a little out of hand too. Whereas Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl are much more "do what I show you because you're new", Mastering Perl is much more "why do we do this?".

There are two opposin…

How can I grep all of BackPAN?

How can we make a Perl code search so I can grep all of CPAN? I would have done this with the now-dead Google Code Search, which used to make this part of world's information and universally accessible and useful.

Specifically, I want to look at every instance of META_MERGE in Makefile.PL in every distribution in BackPAN. I can easily program this task with my DPAN stuff since I already have a way to crawl CPAN and look in every distribution. That would take a couple of days to go through 250,000 files (although maybe I should …

About brian d foy

user-pic I'm the author of Mastering Perl, and the co-author of Learning Perl (6th Edition), Intermediate Perl, Programming Perl (4th Edition) and Effective Perl Programming (2nd Edition).