markov

In my previous post, in February, I announced the overhaul of the MailBox software. The MailBox suite of distributions implement automatic email handling processes. I started development back in 1999, so it had aged a bit. And I can now proudly tell you that the work has been completed!

As you may have experienced yourself: software ages. It's not directly that it does not work anymore, however your own opinion about programming, the features of the language and libraries you use, and the source specifications keep on changing. Basic maintenance picks some of the low-hanging fruits as refreshment, but you usually stay away from major rewrites. Well, the marvelous NLnet Foundation helped me to realize just that!

Some of the changes:

• Supported Perl went from 5.8.5 to 5.16 (2015), to get some nice syntax features like
  `//` and `s///r`


• OODoc improvements make the documentation even better manageable


• Major updates on the documentation text


• New HTML version of the generated docs, purely using client-side rendering


• Code simplifications and less line folding (80 -> 132 chars)


• Some code-style preference changes


• replaced the error handling into real exceptions

The latter change is backwards compatibility breaking: Major version 3 will be maintenance releases for the old error handling. Major version 4 releases will be the main branch for maintenance and development with the new system.

Gladly, the software had over 15.000 regression tests. Also, cpantesters is so incredibly useful, with its active disciples Slaven and Andreas! Thanks so much, guys! However, I do expect some fall-out, especially because exceptions are produced at error conditions, and errors rarely occur. Hence, the code path of errors is rarely used to tend to contain the most issues.

As module author, I am always glad to receive bug-reports; it's much better to have bugs (even tiny typos) fixed, than have them linger around. Help authors by reporting issues!

For exception infra, I picked (my own) Log::Report, which is extremely powerful. I should post a few examples on this medium soon. It integrates nicely with many other exception frameworks, but also opens the path to translation.

Many, many thanks to NLnet and cpantesters.