575 Pull Requests in Three Weeks: What Happens When AI Meets CPAN Maintenance

On March 17th, I installed a bot called koan on my personal Claude account. It's designed to monitor your four-hour usage limits, maintain a queue of "missions," and efficiently use your credits — even while you're sleeping.

Three weeks later, I had reviewed and merged 575 pull requests across 20 CPAN repositories, cut 58 releases across 17 of them, and caught memory leaks, security holes, and long-standing bugs that nobody had gotten around to fixing in years.

Some people think that means I let an AI commit unchecked code to…

4 days in Amsterdam with porters


Deprecation of $[

Last year, we went over all of the long-standing deprecations in core. All but $[ were given an official EOL. $[ was not because we could not come up with a plan.

There are 3 use cases we expect are going on:

  • using $[ in a conditional
  • Assigning to $[
  • Assigning to $[ but making it = 0 which doesn't do …

grep.metacpan.org at the Perl Toolchain Summit

Introducing the new way to grep CPAN: https://grep.metacpan.org/
My co-worker Nicholas and I were honored to be invited to attend the Perl Toolchain Summit in Lyon, France last week. It was a great experience for both of us.

Earlier this year, I needed to answer some questions being put to me by the toolchain gang about the scope of the problem of build/test/install without ="https://blogs.perl.org/users/todd_rinaldo/2016/11/how-removing-from-…

Reviewing Perl 5 . in @INC at the Perl Toolchain Summit

Location: Lyon, France
Attending: SawyerX, Merijn (Tux) Brand, Todd (toddr) Rinaldo, Nicolas (atoomic) Rochelemagne, Lee Johnson, Aaron (arc) Crane, Leon (leont) Timmermans, Matthew (alh) Horsfall, Kenichi (charsbar) Ishigaki, Graham (haarg) Knop, Karen (ether) Etheridge, Stefan (nine) Seifert, Aristotle

We met to discuss the recent changes to @INC for Perl 5.26.

A timeline and summary of CVE-2016-1238 was given to attendee…

How removing . from @INC is about to break CPAN

In Perl 5.26, it will no longer be a safe assumption to assume . is in @INC. This is a good move towards a more secure Perl, but will break the installation of many CPAN modules. For those of you wondering why this was done, see this post for more information.

Many CPAN modules try to do things like: use inc::Module::Install; This depends on . being in @INC. If you invoke Makefile.PL without it, the script will not even run.

We have come up with several ways to mi…