The Perl Foundation

To this post follows a set of posts with proposals received by the Perl Foundation grants committee during the second call for grant proposals for 2008. Although not usual, the rules of the TPF GC are changing and we hope to make this a rule. Proposals are accepted during one month and after that period, they are posted for public discussion on the Internet. This is important to make GC more aware of the community interest on the project, and to help opening the grants attribution process.

During the month of April we received the following grant proposals:

• Perl 6 Tables
• Solidifying and Extending the Blog Normalize project
• Add Perl support to NetBeans
• Perl on a Stick
• SMOP - Simple Meta Object Programming
• Fixing Bugs in the Archive::Zip Perl Module
• CatalystX::Installer Application
• Perl Survey
  
• Revision Control for all CPAN
• Improve POE::Component::IRC
• DBEditor
• Extending BSDPAN
• Make localtime() and gmtime() Work Past 2038
• CPAN Stability Project
• Test::Builder 2
• Automatic INSTALL generation
• Module Installation Configuration Wizard
  

Please take some time on reading the proposals carefully and give some feedback on the relevance of the proposals.

NOTE: This discussion period will end May 10. Starting that date, the GC will begin the voting process. Please comment on each specific grant post or, if you want to give a broad opinion and comparison on the proposed grants, please comment this post. Thanks!

NOTE2: There are five new projects submitted by Michael Schwern. Although they were received one day later they were accepted because Michael sent some emails to me asking for one more day.

NOTE3: Somebody asked on a comment how these grants proposals work, and when. Please refer to the Perl Foundation Grants Committee page.

• Name: Alan Haggai Alavi
• Title: Fixing Bugs in the Archive::Zip Perl Module
• Synopsis: Perl programs often need to manipulate .zip files. Archive::Zip (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Archive-Zip/) is a Perl module that allows a Perl program to manage Zip archive files without calling an external utility. The Archive::Zip module, however, has some bugs which prevent it from generating fully-portable .zip files, that are handled correctly by all .zip file readers and manipulators. The project's main aim is to address the outstanding bug reports (http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=Archive-Zip), by using pyconstruct (http://pyconstruct.wikispaces.com/), which is a flexible framework for defining dissectors for binary formats in a declarative way.

• Name: Michael G Schwern
• Project Title: Module Authoring Documentation
• Synopsis: Write a "wizard" to guide users through finding the correct arguments
  for MakeMaker and Module::Build by asking them how they want modules
  installed. Provide as a stand alone app, integrate into the CPAN
  shell and as part of the MakeMaker and Module::Build installation.

• Name: Paul Cain
• Title: CatalystX::Installer - A generic GUI deployment for catalyst applications
• Synopsis: Create a web application that provides a cross-platform generic GUI for setting up Catalyst applications. There is no command line version of this program since anyone who wants to use the command line can just edit the configuration files directly.

• Name: Kieren Diment
• Project Title: The Perl Survey - From "Pilot" to Production
• Synopsis: In 2007 Kirrily Robert organised and administered the Perl survey (http://perlsurvey.org) to provide a snapshot of the Perl community. In particular she made significant effort to recruit as many people as possible, resulting in a sample size of around 4500 responses. While an excellent start for a design for a survey instrument, it can be improved in a number of ways.

• Name: Eric Wilhelm
• Title: svn.cpan.org - revision control for all of CPAN
• Synopsis: This project will create a universally addressable Subversion space for the Perl community. It will be populated with historical and ongoing CPAN releases. Every CPAN author will be given a public version control repository, and may use a portion of it for any (reasonable) purpose. Alternate views, such as mappings for each distribution, will be handled via the http namespace.

• Author: Hinrik Örn Sigurðsson
• Title: Improve POE::Component::IRC
• Synopsis: I will improve POE::Component::IRC¹ by overhauling its test suite, adding more features, fixing bugs and writing more documentation.