September 2009 Archives

Eric sent this update:

I've written Combust::Spontaneously to make it possible for anyone
(given cpan, git, and svn tools) to get a local apache-less server
running perl.org's templating system in under 5 minutes. It is now on
the CPAN.

With that, I've been doing some work on the stylesheet and navigation on
the combust templates from learn.perl.org and starting to port some of
my content into it.

--Eric

More info about this grant:
http://www.perlfoundation.org/eric_and_tina_improving_learn_perl_org

As part of a renewed effort to expand the membership of the Board we are pleased to announce the addition of Curtis "Ovid" Poe as our newest Director. Ovid is not new to The Perl Foundation, having been involved with the grants committee since 2003, and we are delighted that he is willing to take on this role.

His first task will be to work with Dan Magnuszewski to expand and improve our current PR and Marketing efforts. We wish them every success in this endeavor.

Every year during conference season, we assess positions in TPF that we need to fill and take advantage of in-person meetings at conferences to try to find candidates. Now that we've worked through that cycle, I'm happy to announce some volunteers in new positions.

• Josh McAdams is moving from PR to Conference Chair and anyone who enjoyed the 2 YAPC::NAs in Chicago knows he's a natural for this position.

• Long-time Perl community member Casey West has agreed to join as website content manager.

• Dan Magnuszewski, a newer face in the Perl community but not new to Perl, takes over the PR role. One of the first things we're proposing to do with the PR role is morph it into a committee type configuration like conferences and grants so we can get broader participation. Dan is already working toward this and other initiatives to get more people involved.

TPF thanks Jeremy Fluhmann for his work as Conference Chair, running the YAPC::NA selection process, keeping the yapc.org web site up-to-date, and committing changes to improve the site.

I'd also like to offer TPF's thanks to Kirsten Jones, who is stepping down from the website content manager position. She did an excellent job of making the main TPF site wiki-driven so everyone could easily make trivial content updates. She also set up Socialtext wikis for internal use and created all sorts of feeds to automate various content functions. Last but not least, she stayed on and helped long after she asked to step down. Once again, many thanks for all of your work.

Please welcome our new TPF members.

Below is the latest Hague grant request, submitted by Jonathan Worthington. Please feel free to comment below.

Project Title

Rakudo Signature Improvements

Synopsis

This grant aims to increase correctness, completeness, stability and performance of Rakudo's implementation of signatures and signature binding.

Benefits to Perl 6 Development

Rakudo has continued to make impressive progress in recent months, and recently the Rakudo team, of which I am a part, has announced plans for a major, usable release of Rakudo Perl 6 in Q2 2010. As part of this, a review of the Rakudo Roadmap has taken place, with the various items on it being flagged by priority, from "release blocker" down to "nice to have".

This grant, which focuses on the handling of parameter binding and signatures, is specifically aimed at making progress on items in the Rakudo roadmap. This naturally means making Rakudo follow the Perl 6 specification more correctly in places as well as implementing missing features that are specified in the synopses. Indeed, correctness and moving towards greater completeness are the main thrust of the work in this grant. However, the work is also essential to improve both the performance and robustness of Rakudo in some of the areas that it is currently most weak.

Deliverables

D1. Extensive refactoring of signatures internals and parameter binding.

D2. Support for binding named arguments to positional parameters.

D3. Support for nested signatures and unpacking of arguments.

D4. Support for using a capture in a signature to receive all of the arguments.

D5. Support for multiple return values as well as binding return values against a signature.

D6. Working with the design team and other Perl 6 implementation developers to get a specification for signature introspection into the Perl 6 synopses and tweaking Rakudo to conform to it.

Dear all, sorry for the delay. August was a complicated month. It is the Conference month and the Vacation month. But I think it was worth waiting for.

This quarter TPF will fund three grants:

• Corporate, Embedded, and Multi-user Perl on Windows by Curtis Jewell. This grant will be co-funded by TPF and Adam Kennedy.

• wxPerl documentation by Eric J. Roode.

• Changing the Perl 5 optree build process into a Abstract Syntax Tree generation and a code generation step by Gerard Goossen. Although the proposed value for this grant exceeds the limit defined, it will be fully funded (as two smaller grants) by TPF given its relevancy.

Finally, none of the other proposed grants were rejected. Therefore, they are maintained and will be re-voted in the next round.

Authors (both accepted and not accepted) will receive a note regarding their proposal in the next few days.