Chad 'Exodist' Granum

I just got back from the Perl Toolchain Summit 2024 in Lisbon Portugal!

Thank you to Grant Street Group for sponsoring my attendance at the event! Grant Street Group is an amazing place to work, and GSG is hiring! Contact me on irc.perl.org (Exodist) if you would like a referral.

This year I took a little side trip before the PTS to explore Lisbon with my wife. It is an amazing city, with a lot of history. I highly recommend visiting it and exploring the castles, palaces, and archaeological sights!

My goal for the PTS was to polish up Yath 2.0 and get it out the door. Spoiler alert: I did not achieve this goal, though I did make good progress. Instead several other things occurred that were even better as far as achieving things that require collaboration go!

Test2/Test2::Suite updates

I had several bug reports that built up over the last couple months. Most of my first day at the PTS was spent fixing these and minting new releases. See the changelog for Test-Simple for details. Without this event it would have been harder to find time to work all these. I also fixed a couple other modules, see my module upload list for all the modules I updated at the PTS.

PAUSE contribution

The PAUSE developers needed a way to manage concurrency. Charsbar (Kenichi Ishigaki) approached me about Parallel::Runner, which was exactly what they needed, but used some outdated modules as I have not touched it in almost a decade. I was able to mint a new release with better and more modern dependencies. Now Parallel::Runner is used under the hood for some PAUSE processes.

Using Yath to test modules on install

Additionally Garu approached me and Leon T. about using Yath as a better and universal way to test modules and upload results to cpanm. This resulted in a collaboration between myself and Leon where we made it will be possible to tell cpan, cpanm, etc to use Yath instead of prove! Once Yath 2.0 and a non-dev version of the new Test-Harness are both available you can do this.

1. You need version 3.49 or greater of Test-Harness (Currently this is only available in a dev version).
2. Install yath 2.0 (not released yet, but soon!)
3. Run like this: HARNESS_SUBCLASS=TAP::Harness::Yath cpanm MODULE
4. You can also set the TAP_HARNESS_YATH_ARGS env var to add comma separated args. (Example: "-j9,-B")

Yath working group (not an official name)

Garu, Preaction, Ilmari, and I came together to discuss Yath. A new goal for yath is to make it possible for Yath to send cpan testers reports. Garu wants a clear and easy way to make reports. Yath, specially with the above changes to Test-Harness should greatly simplify the process. (We also need a cpantesters plugin for Yath)

Ilmari helped me out with an Audit of the DBIc::Class components of Yath, as well as a short review of the schema where he fixed some index definitions. I am very grateful for this code review.

Preaction and I discussed creating a cpan central Yath server (formerly Yath::UI). This would be a very useful tool both for people running tests, and people trying to fix any issues the tests reveal.

Finally we are now trying to plan a Yath hackathon some time this year to all get together and improve Yath. If 2.0 is not released before the hackathon then the goal of the hackathon will be to get it there.

Other items

Many other things happened at the PTS. We had discussions about security and PAUSE/cpan. Metacpan and PAUSE both had significant work done to them, and both are much better today as a result.I did not actively participate in these improvements, so stay tuned for blogs from other attendees!

Monetary sponsors:

Booking.com, The Perl and Raku Foundation, Deriv, cPanel, Inc Japan Perl Association, Perl-Services, Simplelists Ltd, Ctrl O Ltd, Findus Internet-OPAC, Harald Joerg, Steven Schubiger.

In kind sponsors:

Fastmail, Grant Street Group, Deft, Procura, Healex GmbH, SUSE, Zoopla.