Sawyer X

Friday and Saturday have been very productive days for Dancer. We wanted to write up this blog post yesterday night but we were waaaaay too tired for that. Instead, you get it this morning while we're sitting at a great Perl 6 talk by Gabor Szabo.

Friday we met up. I tried to wait for Franck at the train station and got lost... several times. He found me in the end and we went to our hotel room with his co-workers. Sukria and Dams arrived later. It was very exciting to meet the guys I've been working closely with for a while and haven't even met in person yet. Free software sure is nuts! :)

We couldn't fix the internet at the hotel (one cable, no wireless) so we spent a lot of time on discussions about important things. While we do not like bureaucracy, some things had to be sorted out and talked about. Here is a short list of things we've settled:

* We decided on a pull request processing policy, which allows programmers more power, more independence and allows for much quicker (yet safe!) way to process our pull requests - whether to approve to kindly oppose. When a user presents you with a pull request, it's a gift and we don't want to have users wait for these pull requests for more than a day or two. This actually took the majority of the discussion and we made some very good decisions about that.

* We have a new core developer: Damien (dams) Krotkine! Dams has been working with us on Dancer for a while now and provided pull requests, help, documentation, features, fix ups, and we really wanted to provide him with more control over Dancer. In fact, he was practically a core developer for a while now, but he now finally got an official commit bit. Congratulations, Dams!

Saturday (yesterday) was an even more successful day. We started with a hack session of a few hours. We closed 6 pull requests (all except 1) and all outstanding bugs!! We also had a triage of the issues list and classified them. Some of those were classified as new bugs, while others were classified differently (such as "Change required" which means it's not broken, but there's a recommended behavior change needed). We replied on almost all issues so we know what to fix and when, and raised discussion and changes in other places. We also released a few new versions (from development branch and stable branch) of Dancer that also include a new format of a the changes log, as discussed in previous posts. You can see it here. I think you'll find it quite nifty! :)

Dams has written two plugins (while working on an example application for his talk, it's a command line Curses twitter client, hell yeah!): Dancer::Plugin::FlashMessage and Dancer::Plugin::Captcha::reCaptcha. While the first one existed, he was able to finalize the implementation to match the spec that was previous defined by other frameworks (such as RoR) for this feature. From this point on we'll be able to add nifty features that are missing in others. Flavio Poletti is on the front for new ideas for the flash message feature. Good job! The Captcha plugin is pretty self explanatory. It's funny since it's something Gabor suggested on the plane, not regarding Dancer necessarily. Hey, it's already done and you'll see it on CPAN soon. The myth lives on!

As a very small note, I was able to release a first development release of MetaCPAN::API, which I'll talk more about in another post.

There were further discussions about our release policy. PAUSE has a limitation of not allowing authors to upload older versions of already-existing distributions, so we can no longer support new 1.2xxx releases. That means that we'll have to think of versions in a different way. There was a long discussion, that reached a late hour (while we hacked, actually) and in the end we decided on a release policy which we will later release to the mailing list and in the docs, and perhaps in a blog post for others to learn from (hopefully).

That's it for now. Expect another report soon!