From jkeenan at pobox.com  Sun Dec 14 17:19:06 2025
From: jkeenan at pobox.com (James E Keenan)
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2025 20:19:06 -0500
Subject: [Philadelphia-pm] QA assistance sought for Perl core distribution
Message-ID: <5918f60c-0a84-4f14-99c0-2effb56124aa@pobox.com>

Friends,

If you have a few brain cycles to spare over the next 48 hours and would 
like to help out with a little QA project for the Perl 5 core 
distribution, please read on!

Periodically we have to deprecate functionality in the core that, for 
one reason or another, we judge to be sub-par.  Our practice nowadays is 
to have the questionable functionality emit a warning which advises the 
user that the code is deprecated, will be removed from the language in 
an upcoming production release -- at which point the code will throw a 
fatal error.  We try to identify CPAN distributions which will be 
affected by deprecations and fatalizations, but we can't always be 
certain that we've covered all cases.

In our current development cycle (5.43, leading to a 5.44 production 
release in May 2026), we have several deprecations in progress.  We have 
a list of CPAN distributions whose code is likely to "break" when a 
particular deprecation is upgraded to an exception.  We would like to 
recruit some volunteers to help us with this -- and such help would be 
particularly useful in the next 24 to 48 hours!

What you will do if you volunteer is:

* I will send you a list of 10 CPAN distributions likely to be affected 
by a particular deprecation/fatalization.   That list will also have 
URLs for the distribution's metacpan.org page and its page on 
CPANtesters (though the latter will not be immediately relevant).

* You will go to the distribution's Metacpan page, click on the link for 
"Bugtracker" and go to that distribution's issue tracker (usually on 
either rt.cpan.org or github.com).

* You will check the list of bug tickets/issues on that page to see 
whether there is any ticket open which seems to have a bearing on the 
deprecation in question. (I'll provide more information about the 
deprecation in individual emails once you've volunteered).

     * If there is a pertinent bug ticket, you will read it to see 
whether the distribution's author/maintainer has responded.  You will 
summarize the author's response to me, if any.

     * If there is no pertinent bug ticket, you (a) will let me know 
that; and (b), if you feel ambitious, file such a bug ticket, then send 
me the URL for that ticket or issue.

If you want to help out here, please email me *off list* and I'll send 
you a list of 10 CPAN distributions needing checking.

(And while I have your attention here ... Please consider joining the 
new New York Perlmongers (ny.pm) mailing list at:
https://groups.google.com/g/new-york-perlmongers).

Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan