April 2009 Archives

Coming off the completion of his first Hague grant, Jonathan Worthington has submitted a request for a new Ian Hague Perl 6 development grant for his proposal "Traits, Introspection and More Dispatch Work For Rakudo". A part of the Hague grant process is that submitted grant requests may, as opted by the submitter, be provided for public and community comment.

Jonathan's grant request is included here, below. Any interested Perl community members may provide their comments regarding this grant request here.

In late November 2007 Jonathan Worthington submitted a Hague Perl 6 Grant proposal entitled 'Rakudo Dispatch and Role Enhancements'. I am pleased to announce that Jonathan submitted his final Hague grant report yesterday (included below the fold), and it was approved and accepted by chromatic, the grant manager for the grant. This successfully completes this Hague Grant for Perl 6 development. We thank Jonathan for his great work on this grant and his efforts in advancing the goal of a completed Perl 6 implementation.

Back a few months ago I was interviewed by Renée Bäcker, the publisher of $foo, the German language Perl magazine. The issue with that interview is just about to be released. You can read the English version of the interview online. Understandably the interview talks about TPF's perspective on Perl through 2008 and other news and happenings in Perl and TPF.

Earlier this past week I submitted a proposal to the TPF Board of Directors; the PDF of this proposal is attached here. The plan includes a long list of projects, most of which have been discussed within TPF for a while but have been on indefinite hold due mainly to lack of available effort to address them properly. Some are for TPF process improvement and others are in more direct support of the Perl community. The essence of plan is that I be employed on contract by TPF for the next 6 months working on this list.

The funding for this plan comes from the Ian Hague donation. The proposal I gave Mr. Hague last year featured a division of it into two halves of $100k each: one for p6 development, the other for TPF organization building, which explicitly included the option to fund paid TPF staff. So, we have the money and the blessing of the funder for it to be used in this way. The requested amount in my proposal to TPF is US$5k/month * 6 months = US$30k. This monthly amount is the same as is provided for Hague grants.

As a volunteer myself for the past few years I've been able to allocate maybe 2 hours in an average week to TPF business. Very rarely I've been able to invest significant chunks of time, and it seems the bigger things I've accomplished have come from those periods of exceptional effort (e.g. Forrester Survey @ 40 hours over 2 weeks, Ian Hague donation @ 80 hours over 1 month). This suggests to me that we'll get some really good results out of this plan: TPF has never had on the order of 1000 focussed hours invested into it before, especially for the kinds of things I list in the proposal document.

I think this is a unique opportunity: the right combination of TPF having funding plus the mandate to use the funds in this way, TPF having significant needs, and the right candidate to address those needs being available at the right time to be used in this way. The situation has some similarities with what's going on in some other places in the Perl world, like pmichaud being supported to be the Rakudo architect, and Dave Mitchell working on the 5.10.1 release: support is being used to to let exceptional people spend large amounts of time on big, gnarly problems which advance important community projects, while at the same time these people can enable the volunteer communities also working on those projects be more successful and productive. This is a chance for TPF to improve itself by using some of that same good foo.

Later this week the TPF Board will make a decision whether to approve this proposal. In order to help them with that they want your input -- so, please post any comments you have here. (No anonymous postings please. Use real names and email addresses; pseudonyms are okay only when they're well known through the Perl community and can be correctly connected to email addresses for any needed follow-up.) I am happy to participate, answer questions, clarify my thoughts, etc. here, in email and also over on #tpf on irc.perl.org if you'd rather chat with me real-time there.

(The following message was written by Jonathan Leto, TPF's organizer-in-chief for GSoC 2009. TPF gives its warmest thanks to Jonathan for all his work on GSoC 2009.)

I have the extreme pleasure to announce that the Google Summer of Code
2009 has officially started and The Perl Foundation will be mentoring
9 students this year in a variety of projects. A breakdown of each
student project and mentor with links to the project abstract can be
found at [1]. If you would like to keep up with recent updates, then
subscribe to this RSS feed [2]. If you would like to get a little more
involved, come join us in #soc-help on irc.perl.org or join the
tpf-gsoc-students list [3].

[1] http://leto.net/dukeleto.pl/2009/04/google-announces-nine-students-in-gsoc2009-with-the-perl-fou.html
[2] http://leto.net/dukeleto.pl/atom.xml
[3] http://groups.google.com/group/tpf-gsoc-students

Thanks to everyone involved, including students with projects that
were not accepted. We had a limited number of spots and some very good
applications could not be accepted. With a bit more spit and polish
some would be a great fit for a TPF grant. Thank you to everyone who
applied, and if you did not get accepted this year, you can still
implement your project and become part of the community, without
getting paid. I promise, we don't bite.

Stay tuned for further updates.

Dave Rolsky finished writing the Moose Documentation. This grant started a few months ago, and Dave delivered it quickly. You can read Dave wrap-up on his blog

Grants updates:

Port PyYAML to Perl -- Ingy döt Net

Ingy update:

I just finished giving my YAML talk today at the NPW in Oslo. It was well received. Later the slides will be up at http://ingydotnet.github.com/yaml-npw2009-talk/

This weekend is a hackathon. One of my big plans is to get PyYaml ported to Perl6 in Rakudo enough to parse Larry's syntax trees.

YAML::Perl is all ported but just needs to:
* Finalize work on tag/type resolution.
* Polish the front end APIs.
* Finish passing the test suite.
* Get all the doc written.

Then I think I'll be done with the grant.

Fixing Bugs in the Archive::Zip Perl Module -- Alan Haggai Alavi

No updates from Grant Manager.

Test::Builder 2 -- Michael G Schwern

No updates from Grant Manager.

Perl cross-compilation for linux and wince -- Vadim Konovalov

No updates from Grant Manager.

Tcl/Tk access for Rakudo -- Vadim Konovalov

No updates from Grant Manager.

Perl Survey -- Kieren Diment

No updates from Grant Manager.

Mojo Documentation Project -- Sebastian Riedel

Sebastian is still working on the first chapter. He should commit a first draft soon for public review.

Embedding perl into C++ applications -- Leon Timmermans

No update received.

Moose docs -- Dave Rolsky

Dave has finished his Moose Doc grant. Soon a complete report. For now, check his blog entry

Improving learn.perl.org -- Eric and Tina

Eric update: I finally got some sysadmin time: http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/

There are no changes here yet vs learn.perl.org, but I've got all of my plumbing done and I'm figuring out what my constraints are with combust and etc.

I need to figure out what to do with the books - Robert wants me to keep them up but I'm not sure about having them use so much space on the front page -- I'll start a discussion with Robert and Ask about that. There's also http://books.perl.org, which could use some tough love.

A lightweight web framework for Perl 6 -- Ilya, Carl and Stephen

Ilya, Carl & Steven have been hard at work. In four short weeks they've gone form nothing to having their basic "hello world" application "Nibbler" up and running in Perl6 - great work from all involved.

You can get the full story by looking at their GitHub project http://github.com/masak/web and their many blog posts:

• Week 1 of Web.pm
  • Specifying a framework basics
  • Web.pm first week
• Week 2 of Web.pm
  • Creating a minimal Web framework
  • Web.pm second week
• Week 3 of Web.pm
  • Creating a minimal Web framework, cont'd
  • Tags.pm for the Perl 6 Web project
• Week 4 of Web.pm
  • Web apps, the first hesitant steps

The Nordic Perl Workshop will be taking place this week on Thursday and Friday in Oslo, Norway. The theme for this year's conference is "Your Future with Perl". The focus will be on Perl 6, Rakudo, Parrot, and modern ways of using Perl 5.

A three day Perl 6 and Enlightened Perl Hackathon will follow the workshop. If you are interested in finding out more about this, take a look at the Perl 6 Hackathon Targets.

The Perl Foundation is looking at giving some grants ranging from $500 to $3000 in May 2009.

In the past, we've supported Adam Kennedy's PPI, Strawberry Perl and Perl on a Stick, Nicholas Clark's work on Perl internals, Jouke Visser's pVoice, Chris Dolan on Perl::Critic and many others (just check http://www.perlfoundation.org/grants for more references).

You don't have to have a large, complex, or lengthy project. You don't even have to be a Perl master or guru. If you have a good idea and the means and ability to accomplish it, we want to hear from you!

Do you have something that could benefit the Perl community but just need that little extra help? Submit a grant proposal by May 31.

As a general rule, a properly formatted grant proposal is more likely to be approved if it meets the following criteria

• It has widespread benefit to the Perl community or a large segment of it.
• We have reasons to believe that you can accomplish your goals.
• We can afford it (please, respect the limits or your proposal should be rejected immediately).

To submit a proposal see the guidelines at http://www.perlfoundation.org/how_to_write_a_proposal and TPF rules of operation at http://www.perlfoundation.org/rules_of_operation. Then send your proposal to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org. Note that starting with this round, proposals should be properly formatted accordingly with our POD template.

On June 1st, proposals will be made available publicly (on this blog) for public discussion, as it happened in the previous round. So, please make it clear in your proposal if it should not be public.

Note that accepted but not funded proposals in the previous round do not need to be re-submitted.

Grants updates:

Port PyYAML to Perl -- Ingy döt Net

No updates this time.

Fixing Bugs in the Archive::Zip Perl Module -- Alan Haggai Alavi

No updates this time.

Extending BSDPAN -- Colin Smith

Grant closed due to grantee lack of feedback.

Test::Builder 2 -- Michael G Schwern

Michael update:

At the Birmingham QA Hackathon, between answering random questions and having random TAP discussions, my focus was on working on Test::Builder2.

While I was explaining the blocking issues to going forward to AndyA he observed that I know what to do and really it's all a simple matter of programming and I should really stop griping and just code it up. So I did.

Fortunately I got help in the form of Birmingham local Colin Newell who picked up git, forked repository management and the proposed TB2 result/output architecture from my vague wiki notes and hurried explanations. Then he was off and working mostly independently, committing excellent code. Towards the end I was consulting him for architectural issues. :)

As an aside, one of the things I enjoy about git's merge process is it doesn't flatten or alter the changes. So if you look at the TB2 branch Colin's name is retained on Colin's work which is quite nice. http://github.com/schwern/test-more/commits/Test-Builder2

Anyhow, Colin sums up the work quite nicely. http://colinnewell.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/perl-qa-hackathon-testbuilder2/

Now there should be enough of the Result/Output code in place to allow folks to do some independent work. The output classes in particular are a missing a lot of key features. There's no way to tell an Output about a comment. Results don't include any of the usual free diagnostics (file, line, name, etc..) and Output::TAP doesn't do anything with the right now anyway.

From a top-down approach, one might want to attempt implementing more of Test::Simple or even making Test::Builder use the TB2::History object to store results.

And then all this reveals more architectural issues which I'll get into in a later post.

Perl cross-compilation for linux and wince -- Vadim Konovalov

No updates.

Tcl/Tk access for Rakudo -- Vadim Konovalov

No updates.

Perl Survey -- Kieren Diment

No updates.

Mojo Documentation Project -- Sebastian Riedel

No updates.

Embedding perl into C++ applications -- Leon Timmermans

Leon update:

I've moved my project from google code to github. You can find it at github now. On the programming side I've added support for matching regular expressions. I wanted to have substitutions too before this report but that will have to wait for the next one. Soon I'll have full regular expression support in libperl++ :-).

Also I've been having some valuable feedback on the Dutch Perl Workshop. In particular I'm probably going to split my string class in a byte string and a Unicode string variant. That way string operations will be a lot more sane from the C++ point of view. Also, I've just uploaded the presentation I gave (PPT). Sadly, the video doesn't seem to be available yet.

Moose docs -- Dave Rolsky

Dave update:

I'm just inches away from declaring the grant done.

Last week, I released new versions of Class::MOP and Moose which feature (mostly) complete API docs. I say mostly because some things are intentionally being left undocumented for now. These are methods with public names (no leading underscore) that I think should be made private, or in a few cases entire classes with really weird APIs that need some rethinking. I think the API docs are done enough to satisfy the grant requirements.

Some of this rethinking has already happened, and doing this doc work let to some refactoring and deprecations, with hopefully more to come.

In the area of Moose Cookbook recipes, I'm one recipe away from done-ness. New recipes cover custom meta-instance and meta-method classes. Back in mid-February I released recipes for using BUILD and BUILDARGS, and applying roles to an object instance.

I expect to have the last recipe finished sometime by mid-April.

Improving learn.perl.org -- Eric and Tina

Eric update:

We're somewhat stalled right now due to schedule conflicts and prior engagements but I'll be setting-up a local site in the next week and we should have something publicly visible by the end of this month.

A lightweight web framework for Perl 6 -- Ilya, Carl and Stephen

No updates, as grant manager was ill.

There is still time to apply to take part in this year's Google Summer of Code.

Don't forget student applications must be submitted by April 3rd, 12 Noon, PDT.