[Chicago-talk] What Perl stuff is everyone doing?

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all,

On Sunday 28 June 2009 22:20:13 Andy Lester wrote:
> What kinds of Perl things is everyone doing these days?
>

well, I've been working on quite a few Perl projects, actually. The first one 
worth mentioning is CPANHQ. See my blog post about it:

http://community.livejournal.com/shlomif_tech/28209.html

Essentially CPANHQ aims to be an open-source, unified, meta-data-enhanced, and 
community-driven interface to CPAN. At the moment, we have little to show for, 
but we've been making progress. CPANHQ was my chance to finally get my feet 
wet with Catalyst and DBIX-Class, and they both seem pretty nice so far.

I also did some work on File-Find-Object and File-Find-Object-Rule :

http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/projects/File-Find-Object/

In case, you don't know, F-F-O is an object-oriented alternative to File::Find 
that can be instantiated, has an iterative/incremental interface and can 
return result objects. File-Find-Object-Rule is a port of File-Find-Rule to 
use it instead of File::Find, and lately, I've made its ->start() and -
>match() methods truly iterative instead of using ->in() which just collected 
all the results into one humongous array and kept shifting stuff from it. This 
was a severe mis-feature of File-Find-Rule, IMO, and was implied by the 
limitations of File::Find.

Another thing I've done was did some cosmetic work on the Build.PL files of 
some my CPAN distributions. Namely I added some links to resources and 
keywords (that can also be thought of as tags or labels) as specified in the 
META.yml spec:

http://module-build.sourceforge.net/META-spec.html

resources are displayed in the the distribution's pages on search.cpan.org and 
other sites. Author keywords (when they exist, and very few have been defined) 
are currently under-utilised. However, but I recently added some rudimentary 
support for them in CPANHQ (see above), and I hope that they will soon become 
more popular.

A different aspect of my cleanup was clarifying the licensing terms of the 
distributions. My original distributions are under the MIT/X11 licence, but I 
wrote "All rights reserved" there as well, which I was told was incompatible 
with it (or with "The same terms as Perl" for that matter). I also added a 
COPYING file where appropriate.

I've finished reading Mastering Perl. I "forked" its github repository and 
made some corrections, which brian d foy has pulled. I did some similar forks 
too that way for Perl projects.

I did some other work on the CPAN modules that I maintain see:

http://search.cpan.org/~shlomif/?R=D

As a result of experimenting with these various Perl-based technologies, I've 
been building many CPAN distributions as RPM packages on my Mandriva Linux 
system. I found this bash function useful:

<<<
function up() { urpmi "perl($1)" ; }
>>>

So I can say "up MyModule::Sub" and it will install the package containing the 
Perl .pm "MyModule::Sub".

Sometimes building the packages was straightforward, but often I needed to 
apply some patches to the build .spec or the tests.

On the non-Perl related (but still open-source) front, I've been working on 
http://fc-solve.berlios.de/ . I released a stable version only to discover its 
build process was severly broken (especially on Windows) so I had to release a 
x.y.1 release.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

-- 
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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Interview with Ben Collins-Sussman - http://xrl.us/bjn8s

God gave us two eyes and ten fingers so we will type five times as much as we
read.