[Brisbane-pm] Contribute towards the Perl 5.8.9 release documents and get supper bragging rights.

[Paul Fenwick]

G'day Sydney.pm, Canberra.pm, and Brisbane.pm,

As some of you may have heard, I've volunteered to write the
release notes for the upcoming 5.8.9 release of Perl.  However I rapidly
discovered there's an awful lot of changes that need to be examined and
distilled into the final document that will become perl589delta.pod.

Luckily, this is a task that's easily broken into chunks and run in
parallel, and I've done exactly that.  I've got a copy of all the changes
that have gone into the 5.8 branch since 5.8.8 was released, and I've
chunked it by month.  Some months are quiet, with not many changes, and some
months are very busy, with lots of changes.

I'm making a call out to the Perl community to volunteer to help with the
writing of the release notes.  You don't need to be familiar with Perl's
guts to do this; if you don't understand a change we'll have a "too hard"
bucket that things can be thrown into, and someone (who may be me) will
figure them out.  Likewise, you don't need a lot of time; I'm not expecting
everyone who volunteers for a chunk of work to finish the entire chunk, just
as long as you work on it sequentially and let us know where you're up to,
you can put it down at any time.

Contributing to the perl589delta project directly helps with the release of
Perl 5.8.9.  However you'll also get a mention in the prestigious Perl
authors file, which looks totally awesome on your resume, and gives you
super bragging rights.  If you're on www.ohloh.net, you'll get kudos from
me, and commit points from the project.  Your work will almost certainly
give you enough material for a 5-minute "What's new in my bit of Perl 5.8.9"
lightning talk, which will make you incredibly popular at conferences and
user-groups.

In order to get started, just follow the instructions in the README file at
the bottom of our source control repository page at:

	http://github.com/pfenwick/perl589delta/

and sign up to the discussion list at:

	http://groups.google.com/group/perl589delta/

Feel free to track the repository or sign up the list even if you're not
sure if you want to contribute, and are just curious about how all this
works.  We're happy to have the company!

If you have any questions, you can ask on the list, e-mail me privately, or
mail the perl589delta team at perl589delta at googlegroups.com

Many thanks, and all the best,

	Paul

-- 
Paul Fenwick <pjf at perltraining.com.au> | http://perltraining.com.au/
Director of Training                   | Ph:  +61 3 9354 6001
Perl Training Australia                | Fax: +61 3 9354 2681