NEILB's Blog

The term 'Perl community' is bandied about, but it's not always clear what it means, or the scope of it. I'm not going to try and nail it down, just talk about one aspect. When working on a new module, three different people helped me within 24 hours or so, and that felt good.

As I've previously written about, one of the things I do when I adopt a distribution is to get it 'CPANTS clean'. To make my life ever-so-slightly-easier, I've created a Dist::Zilla command that will generate the CPANTS Kwalitee score for your distribution: dzil kwalitee.

Whenever I adopt a module now, one of the first things I do is switch to Dist::Zilla, because it makes my life easier. But now I'm thinking I should only do this when it's a clear adoption, with minimal chance of the previous maintainer getting involved again. There's the perennial problem people have with DZ: to work on a module you have to install Dist::Zilla, and that doesn't always go smoothly.

Today was the 100th consecutive day that I released something to CPAN. Ninety days ago BARBIE had done 11 days, prompted by my CPAN regular releasers page, and announced his intention to do 30 (so he would lead the all-time daily list). I decided to give chase, figuring I could ride in his slipstream, and do one more release than him when he stopped. But the bugger hasn't stopped yet!

At last year's London Perl Workshop I went to an entertaining and interesting talk about fractions by Theo Van Hoesel. After releasing the first version of Lingua::EN::Fractions I got in touch with Theo to talk about fractions.

Three years ago I adopted Sean Burke's Lingua::EN::Numbers, as a result of reviewing CPAN modules for spelling numbers in English. Last month (May) I adopted two more of Sean's Lingua::EN:: modules, Lingua::EN::Numbers::Ordinate and Lingua::EN::Numbers::Years. Today Sean casually challenged me to add to the collection, which resulted in the first release of Lingua::EN::Fractions.

I just finished reading Learning Perl, the 6th edition. I previously had read the first edition when it came out. Between roughly 2002 and 2010 I didn't do much Perl, and have only been finding out about the changes in Perl somewhat sporadically. I decided I really should be a bit more thorough, and started here.

BARBIE and I have been working on a new BackPAN index, and some related things. At the centre of this are BackPAN::Index::Create and create-backpan-index, the module and associated script that can be used to create a BackPAN index. This is now the index used by CPAN::ReleaseHistory, so it's relying on an open-source BackPAN index.

With relatively little fanfare Chris Williams, aka BINGOS, today announced that he's passed 20 million reports submitted to CPAN Testers. I think we should all pause to thank Chris for his contribution to one of the key resources for CPAN authors.

Two days ago I released Perl::MinimumVersion 1.36 to CPAN; there were two main commits that added checks for 3 changes in Perl. Both of those changes had bugs, and in doing so I broke things for other people, something I really didn't want to do. As a result I had to do a release tonight, to fix one of the bugs and back out the other until I can do it properly. I'm going to talk through how I've been working on Perl::MinimumVersion, the bugs, and what I'm going to change. Hopefully people might point out other ways I can improve how I work.