All of us showed up for a long meeting of identifying release blockers. First we went over the issues and PRs submitted since last week, none of which turned out to be new potential blockers. Then we examined all of the issues and PRs of interest we had previously identified. We applied the “Release Blocker” label where necessary, left comments, and merged a few of the PRs. Out of 20 issues and 11 PRs on our list, we identified 5 issues and 1 PR as blockers, of which the PR and several of the issues all pertain to the same problem with retention of errors on filehandles across I/O operations. This issue needs an informed decision, which we did not have the time for in this meeting, but will pursue next.

Our next meeting will be in person at the PTS.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Map::Tube now supports Unicode character in station names.
Please check out the link below for more information.
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/map-tube-unicode

Yes, this is a Mandelbrot fractal with three heads. No cloning needed, just multiply z to the power of four and proceed as usual. Well all this and so much more contains the latest release of Juliagraph 0.7. Intro here. All I wrote about the Cellgraph and Harmonograph applies again, more features, better controls and ... you can cruise the fractal by mouse.

One of my pleasures in perl is learning the C language again. Something about the perl language makes it easier to write C, but while sharing the same space in my brain.

So how can I write a trivial program to write exactly one GB (2^30) of data to disk?

first in perl- (Of course you prototype in perl!)

But since my c program is cleaner, here’s the C program

We were all present.

• CVE-2024-56406 is published and has been addressed by new point releases. Please upgrade or patch your perl promptly if affected. We thank Steve Hay, Andreas König and Stig Palmquist for doing the heavy lifting, as well as Nathan Mills for discovering the problem, and Karl Williams for providing the fix. We re-/learned a number of old and new lessons about the handling of security issues, which we will write up as new process for the PSC, the Perl Security Team, and the CPANSec group, to be jointly reviewed and agreed at the looming PTS.

• We started winnowing this release cycle’s pull requests for potential release blockers. We briefly reviewed all 72 pull requests and identified 11 of interest for a closer look.

• We reviewed the 2 new issues filed since last week for release blocker potential and put one of them on our list for closer review. We then started a closer examination of the 20 issues we identified as candidate blockers. We got through 5 issues, none of which we considered blockers.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Couple of experimental features added to Map::Tube.
Please check out the link below for more information.
https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/map-tube-experimental

With the Harmonograph you can create beautiful and individual images within a few clicks. It's painting by pendulum. I already gave here an introduction. So let me just explain what is new:

My home page gives you access to:

o Perl TiddlyWiki V 1.25
o Mojolicious TiddlyWiki V 1.03
o Debian TiddlyWiki V 1.07
o Some other stuff...

What's new?

• The BoolLike type constraint accepts boolean.pm booleans.
• Type::Params offers some improvements for DWIM named parameter processing.
• More shortcuts are provided for exporting parameterized versions of type constraints.

I started using DEV at the suggestion of Perl Weekly, and I was quite pleased with it - until I discovered that links to dev.to are effectively "shadowbanned" on several major platforms (Reddit, Hacker News, etc.). Posts containing DEV URLs would simply not be shown to users, making it impossible to share content effectively.

To work around this, I thought I would need a way to publish my DEV articles on my own domain so I could freely share them. There are some DEV tutorials out there that explain how to consume the API using frontend frameworks like React, however I don't enjoy frontend at all and I did not want to spend much time on that.

My solution was to get a simple Perl script that builds static versions of the articles, along with an index page. A Perl 5 script will run anywhere, including an old shared linux hosting account I still keep on IONOS, and I really like the speed of static sites.

Now that we have set up our mbtiny configuration in the previous post, we can actually use it.

Minting a new distribution

Minting a distribution is trivial once you’ve completed the setup. It’s typically just a matter of calling mbtiny mint Foo::Bar. If needed you can override the global configuration at minting time (e.g.  mbtiny mint Foo::Bar --license BSD).

Converting an existing distribution

You can also convert an existing distribution to App::ModuleBuildTiny. In most cases that requires just two things:

Years ago I wrote about a concise fork idiom. It turns out that it’s possible to do better than everything I discussed in that entry as well as the proposals in the comments.

I didn’t at the time appreciate a clever aspect of variable scoping in Perl:

use strict;
sub get_answer { 0 }
if ( my $answer = get_answer ) {
    ...;
} else {
    print $answer;
}

(apologies for "promoting"(?) Perl obfuscation...)

Today I won a gift card at an in-office meeting with the following code. Challenge: print the numbers 1-100 in the most incomprehensible, inefficient way. My entry, edited for brevity:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use v5.16;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
splice @_, @_, -1, ++$_;
# plus 95 more of this
say join $/, @_;

Thinking about it more this evening, I came up with

$SIG {__DIE__} = sub { $_ = (pop)+0; chomp; $_%6?say:exit};
{ select undef,undef,undef,1; eval { die time-$^T }; redo; }

(where 6 instead of 101 so I don't have to wait 100 seconds (and to be honest I'm not sure if there'll be rounding errors)).

Wonder if any obfuscators could come up with better (the less inefficient, incomprehensible the better).

Control. That’s what we all desire and very rarely acquire. The natural restlessness that occurs when you watch one of your offspring flicking from one movie title to the next, barely glancing at the summary before rejecting it, is one of the reasons I don’t like family movie night. My daughter’s grip on the remote is as strong as her decision making skills are weak; I struggle silently to hold back any outburst that would expose my failing parenting abilities once again. I have to distract myself with thoughts of the good old days when the TV had only 4 channels and Teletext was the closest thing to internet. Desiring such regression is now getting much of a habit for me. But we change what we can, accept what we can’t and trust, often foolishly, that those blessed with control do the best for all of us. Ah, look. Another teen fantasy horror romance movie. Thanks a heap, Netflix.

App::ModuleBuildTiny is a relatively new authoring tool. It aims to be a relatively lightweight (at least to some other tools like Dist::Zilla) and newbie friendly tool. It supports two install tools: Module::Build::Tiny (obviously what it was originally designed for) and Dist::Build; it does not support ExtUtils::MakeMaker or Module::Build.

I wrote very elliptically about this warning and received some helpful comments with the standard advice about how to proceed when encountering it. Except unfortunately that advice will be of no use when you encounter this warning.

Namely I should have been less cute about it and made it clear that I was specifically talking about a warning about a wide character “in substitution”. How can a s/// even possibly trigger a wide character warning, you ask? Beats me, to be entirely honest, even now, but: if you have a use locale somewhere, it turns out that it can. Because defeating that is what fixed the warning I was getting:

Herewith V 1.24

Cheers

In the last months of the previous century, I had to learn Perl to be able to teach it to professionals. It was my 28th language to use, but still took two years to understand deeply. As experienced assembler and C programmer, I was astound how much more of my ideas I could achieve with this new Swiss army knife in my hands. I fell in love with Perl.

Of course, the only way to learn a programming language well, is to use it for a larger project. So, I started to re-code the business shell scripts and websites to Perl. Part of it was sending automated emails to colleagues.

Your phase in life is probably different, but for my personal feeling it was not too long ago; for Internet's lifespan, the year 2000 is ancient history. The first spec for MIME headers in email were just 8 years old at the time, and many email features were still evolving.

Die Hochschule der Bayerischen Wirtschaft unterstützt den Perl Workshop 2025 in München.

Wir freuen uns über die Unterstützung durch die HDBW!

Von der bayerischen Wirtschaft, mit der bayerischen Wirtschaft, für die
bayerische Wirtschaft: Die Hochschule der Bayerischen Wirtschaft (HDBW) ist
eine private, staatlich anerkannte Hochschule für angewandte
Wissenschaften - mit Fokus auf Wirtschaft, Technik und Digitalisierung. An der 2012 gegründeten HDBW mit Sitz in
München-Riem studieren derzeit knapp 500 Studierende.

This announcement comes a bit late in the year, but the preparations for the next Perl Toolchain Summit have been going on for several months now. Today I am proud to announce that the 15th Perl Toolchain Summit will be held in Leipzig, Germany, from Thursday May 1st till Sunday May 4th, 2025.

This post is brought to you by Deriv, a Gold Sponsor of the Perl Toolchain Summit 2024.

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