This quarter, The Perl Foundation Grants Committee has three grant proposals. One of them was not funded in the last round, given to budget restrictions. Accordingly with GC rules it should be voted again in this round. Together with that, we have two new proposals. You can read their descriptions bellow, and you are invited to comment on their own posts. Your feedback is important for the Grants Committee.

The received grant proposals are:

• Easy installation of non-CPAN dependencies by Alexandr Ciornii
• Perl module for Linked Data by Tope Omitola
• Spanish Localization of the Perl Core Documentation by Enrique Nell and Joaquin Ferrero

Name:

    Enrique Nell - Language Lead
    Joaquin Ferrero - Tech Lead

Amount Requested:

    USD$2,000

Synopsis

Spanish is the third most commonly used language on the Internet after English and Mandarin. It is also the second most studied language and second language in international communication, after English, in the world. Currently, there are 400 million native speakers and Spanish is the official language in 21 countries. However, the number of contributions to CPAN from the Spanish-speaking community is much lower than expected, considering these figures.

Our goal is to translate the Perl core documentation into Spanish, in order to make it available to a wider public through the POD2::ES distribution. In this process, we are using and developing sustainable procedures that reuse previous translations and provide a quick update for each new Perl release.

We are requesting a grant to boost our work on POD2::ES.

Name:

Tope Omitola

Kjetil Kjernsmo will assist Tope with Perl and CPAN

Amount Requested:

How much is your project worth?

$500

Synopsis

The Semantic Web community has developed a vocabulary named VoID, which is a World Wide Web Consortium Interest Group Note, a de facto standard: http://www.w3.org/TR/void/. The goal of this project is to generate such descriptions, partly automatically, partly by hand-maintained descriptions, using RDF::Trine.

Name:

Alexandr Ciornii (CHORNY)

Amount Requested:

$2000

Synopsis

Many CPAN modules depend on non-CPAN libraries (or programs). Installation of such module requires that library be installed before installing CPAN module. For beginners it is more confusing as library may be installed, but its headers may not. I'd like to automate this step and install corresponding Linux package as part of module install.

Currently main module of this project has codename CPAN::non, it will be renamed later after discussion in module-authors mailing list.

I am pleased to announce that Paul Johnson's grant application, Improving Devel::Cover, has been successful. The grant will be split in two phases, the second phase starting after the completion of the first.

I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on this grant, both on our blog and during the consultation phase.

We have received the following grant application under the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund from Jess Robinson.

Before we vote on this proposal we would like to get feedback and endorsements from the Perl community. Please leave feedback in the comments or send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org.

Name: Jess Robinson

Project Title: Improving Cross compilation of Perl 5

Synopsis:

Perl 5 has several scripts and tools for cross-compiling it for other platforms. These are somewhat inconsistent and scattered across the codebase. My aim is to complete a cross-compilation target for Android, with smoker, and to prepare and document ways to add more targets without specialising for each of them.

The implementation goal is to allow direct cross compilation (no changes to actual Perl C-code, just using the hints system and configuration of cross-compiler paths and flags) to as many current and future platforms as possible, without needing knowledge of the build system internals. Ideally this will automate as much as possible the collection of data for the config files. Only platforms on which we can't run arbitrary compiled C code (eg Android) should get pre-defined config files in core, and if these become unmaintained (not updated when new features are added to Configure) they should be flagged as stale.

Benefits to Perl 5 Core Maintenance:

This work will remove duplicate build scripts and "specialised" code created for various cross compilation environments and either them replace with a generic version, or leave them out completely. Either way this will allow Core contributors to have a better overview of which specialised code needs to be maintained.

Deliverable Elements:

I propose to work this as a pay-as-you-go grant, similar to Nicholas and Dave. The initial request is for 200 hours at $50/hour, over 2 months. If the project proves to need less time than this, we may consider it done and end early, with the payment covering the actual number of hours worked. Alternately, if it requires more time I would be willing to work longer at the same rate to complete unfinished tasks.

The actual deliverables will be determined by the project, but will cover at least the delivery of a working Android cross-compilation build environment, together with a smoke environment to ensure that it continues to compile.

I will deliver weekly summary reports on progress via the p5p mailing list, and an end of month report summarising the whole month. I would then claim for the hours worked in that month.

The grant managers would be allowed at any time to inform the board that the project is failing, and the TPF board, after allowing me to present my side, decide to terminate the project.

Project Details:

I intend to spend time on the following items:

1. Bring my existing Android cross compiling environment and copy of Perl up to date and working. The current branch is based on perl 5.15.1, records work in progress, and uses an NDK two versions out of date. The branch needs rebasing and some restructuring to eliminate extraneous intermediate stages. The version of NDK used doesn't upgrade cleanly to newer ones. Fixing this will require trying to make the use of the NDK more generic and easier to configure in case of more path/binary renaming in future versions. approx 50 hours.

2. Set up a smoker for Android cross-compilation to ensure that the build continues to work. - 10 hours.

3. Refactor the working Android cross compiling approach to minimise divergence from the regular hosted build process, simplifying it as much as possible.

In particular:

• fully exploit the fact that it now uses ./Configure -Dmksymlinks to separate the host and target build trees, which wasn't done previously.
• use lib/buildcustomize.pl to simplify the cases where the host miniperl driving the build needs to report configuration values for the target system.
• assume that a functional /usr/bin/perl is present when cross-compiling, and convert top level driver scripts from /bin/bash to Perl for easier maintenance and improved portability.

[Flexible guess. - 30 hours]

4. Identify a second target platform to cross compile to, representative of a small consumer device running Linux or *BSD on a non-x86 chip, and which can be run under emulation for testing. One plausible candidate is the Raspberry Pi, an ARM Linux device, because developer virtual machines exist, are documented and actively maintained. Get cross compilation to this device working, using the toolchain documented in Cross/README.new, and also using the approach documented in INSTALL. - Unknown.

Refactor the cross compilation code described in the previous steps to

• take advantage of the simplifications possible with -Dmksymlinks and buildcustomize.pl approaches used by the Android port
• minimise the amount of duplication and overlap with the regular hosted build process
• share with the Android port as much code as is practical
• maximise maintainability
• aim toward an approach that where possible is generic, minimising the use of pre-requisite "canned" config files.

5. Document this with a "Howto cross-compile Perl" guide.

6. Set up a smoker for cross-compilation to the small-unix target to ensure that the build continues to work. - 10 hours.

7. Review the various Cross compilation scripts and tools existing today in the core code, to determine which are still required using the revised approaches above. Tidy up by removing / deprecating un-used or obsolete parts.

Stretch goals:

1. Devise and implement a way to perform an installation of the resulting build onto the target smoke platforms (using an emulator), run the perl 5 core test suite, and gather the results to report back to the current smoke system. - Unknown

2. Investigate ways to cross-compile CPAN modules, especially XS modules, and install onto the target device. Likely this would be several steps, starting with modules that don't probe the local system within their Makefile.PL, and build them as part of the main cross build. Then work to decouple building modules from building the perl core, possibly including making the cross-building setup installable on the host machine. - Unknown, estimate 25 hours.

I estimate that the main items 1 to 7 will take around 200 hours to complete. I will work on each item in turn (though not necessarily in the above order) and in stages to provide usable patches during the project.

These items were prepared with much help from Nicholas Clark, many thanks to him.

Project Schedule:

I expect to be working on this alongside other work, and realistically to be spending about half my time on it. Thus I am asking for 200 hours over 2 months.

I am available to start work on this immediately.

Bio.:

I have worked with Perl professionally for the last 7 years, and I spend much of my spare time supporting and encouraging the use of Perl.

I took the Perl 5.10 changes and additions from the android-scripting repo and ported them to enable cross-compiling of Perl 5.15 for Android devices last year, this work can be seen on github: https://github.com/castaway/perl/tree/x-compile-android.

Endorsed by: Nicholas Clark, Ricardo Signes

Amount Requested: $10,000

YAPC::NA 2012 in Madison, Wisconsin is just six weeks away. With this years conference upon us, it is time to plan for 2013. The call for venue is officially open! The TPF Conference Committee will be accepting bids today through June 1st 2012.

What is YAPC::NA?

YAPC::NA is an annual Perl-focused conference held at various locations throughout North America. The conference is a grassroots symposia on the Perl programming language promoted by The Perl Foundation.

What is the "Call for Venue"?

Each year Perl Mongers groups bid to host the conference for the upcoming year in the location of their choosing. The "Call for Venue" is The Perl Foundation's official invitation for groups to send in their bids.

How do you submit a bid?

The best place to start researching is the bidding details page at yapc.org. While there, you'll find links to the venue requirements and the review criteria. You can do a little more research and peek at previous bids by searching the 'yapc' tag at The Perl Foundation blog.

Also, feel free to post your questions to this blog post or email tpf-conferences (at) perl (dot) org. If you know a previous organizer, it might not be a bad idea to chat with he or she to get some advice and see if you are ready to host a conference.

If you think you'd like to submit a bid this year, let us know that you plan on getting one together by emailing tpf-conferences (at) perl (dot) org so that we know that there might be a bid coming and so that we can help you get the bid together by the deadline.

After your done and have your bid together, just email it to tpf-conferences (at) perl (dot) org. Remember, the deadline is June 1st 2012.