April 2010 Archives

I am pleased to announce that The Perl Foundation and Parrot Foundation have had 10 projects accepted for this year's Google Summer of Code.

Student: Justin Hunter
Project Title: Rework Catalyst framework's instance initialisation code to provide more flexible and extensible inversion of control
Mentor: Florian Ragwitz

Student: Tyler Curtis
Project Title: A PAST Optimization Framework for Parrot
Mentor: chromatic

Student: Nat Tuck
Project Title: Hybrid Threads for Parrot
Mentor: Andrew Whitworth

Student: Daniel Arbelo Arrocha
Project Title: NFG and single-representation strings for the Parrot Virtual Machine
Mentor: Allison Randal

Student: Mirko Westermeier
Project Title: Bulletproofing the Mojolicious unit and integration test suite
Mentor: Marcus Ramberg

Student: Ryan Jendoubi
Project Title: Ctypes for Perl
Mentor: Reini Urban

Student: Carl Masak
Project Title: Adding support for binary data in Rakudo
Mentor: Jonathan Worthington

Student: Muhd Khairul Syamil Hashim
Project Title: Implementing an Instrumentation Tool for Parrot VM for GSoC 2010
Mentor: Christoph Otto

Student: John Harrison
Project Title: Improvements to the NCI system and LLVM Stack Frame Builder
Mentor: Peter Lobsinger

Student: Pawel Murias
Project Title: Releasing Mildew and SMOP on CPAN
Mentor: Daniel Ruoso

TPF is helping to sponsor a Perl Booth at LinuxTag, Berlin, which takes place from the 9th - 12th June.

Gabor and the events team are looking for more volunteers. If you are available to help out please add your details to the event co-ordination page on the Perl Foundation wiki.

The promised new Dist::Zilla tutorial has been posted on the new Dist::Zilla home page. (Feedback is encouraged!) Rik has been engaged to speak about YAPC and OSCON about Dist::Zilla, and this talk, complete with voiceover, will be released publicly after the events.

The only remaining task for the Dist::Zilla grant is the overhaul of the new subcommand to dzil.

Philippe Bruhat wrote:

"While YAPC::Europe 2010 preparations are well underway in Pisa, it
is time for the YAPC::Europe Foundation (YEF) to look for suitable
sites for the 2011 conference. Any dedicated group interested in
hosting YAPC::Europe 2011 should send a brief statement of intent to
venue - at - yapceurope.org. This should be followed by a complete application.
The deadline for applications is June 30, 2010.

For details on how to prepare your complete application, consider the
examples of previous conferences at http://www.yapceurope.org/organizers.html .
If your proposal is selected, it will be added to the others on this page
(you will have the opportunity to remove private information first).
Be certain to include contact information (including telephone numbers)
for at least two members of the group.

You may also direct any questions to the aforementioned email address.

A decision on the location will be publicly announced at the beginning of
the Pisa conference."

Also, remember that the YAPC::NA 2011 Call for Venue is open now through June 1st!

Heath Bair writes:

YAPC::NA 2010 is almost here!

June 21st - 23rd 2010 is quickly approaching and Columbus.pm is getting very excited. Hotel reservation information is available, dorm reservation details are up and ready, and the conference is quickly approaching.

For everyone still looking for YAPC::NA 2010 details here is what we have planned.

The conference will be held in the brand new beautiful The Ohio State Union. The main dorm location is Morrison Tower and the Hotel conference block is in The Blackwell Inn.

Larry Wall, Damian Conway, Randal Schwartz, and many others will be in attendance. Early registration is quickly coming to an end so make sure that you forward this to all of your friends and coworkers and get signed up today!

I hope to see you all at YAPC::NA 2010 in beautiful Columbus, Ohio.

Yesterday, Jesse Vincent announced the release of Perl 5.12.0. This is an exciting time for Perl 5 with development switching from feature-driven releases to time-based ones.

You can download this release from http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.12.0/ or your local CPAN mirror. A complete list of the changes can be found in perl5120delta.

We would like to thank Jesse and the development team for all their hard work and we look forward to seeing Perl keep accurate time through 2038 and beyond.

During March Dave Mitchell started working on the Fixing Perl5 Core Bugs grant. As requested he has been posting weekly reports to the p5p mailing list and has provided a monthly summary report for posting here.

Dave Mitchell writes:

A rough summary of activity in March:

first, I tagged all new/open tickets with severity >= medium (about 500 of
them) with one or more types (eg regex, PerlIO). At the same time, I
closed any of those tickets which were obviously fixed or not-a-bug etc.

Then being in a position to view all tickets of a certain type, I
worked my way through the 18 tickets marked as security/taint, and there
is currently just a single one of those left, which I was waiting for some
feedback from p5p before fixing.

I've now started on tie bugs: they are closely related to the issues I
came across in the taint bugs earlier, so thought I might as well have a
look at them while the code is still fresh in my mind.

I've been avoiding working on bugs likely to involve large code changes
until after 5.12 is released and the code freeze ends.

I've also been attempting to ensure that new tickets get correctly marked
up with type etc, and are closed if they've been promptly dealt with.

Note that I've ended up closing quite a lot of tickets that I haven't
actually fixed, but that I've determined during triage are fixed or
not-a-bug etc. The tickets listed below are ones that I have generally
done more work on than just triage.

I notionally started work on this grant on 8th march, so this month isn't
a full one. I have been managing so far to commit approximately 20 hour
per week as promised, and have fixed more than the 1 bug per 20 hours
minimum that was also promised.

TPF is proud to announce the completion of Gerard Goossen grant. As Gerard sent a big report, please check the complete report on the extended new page. I would like to thank you both Gerard for completing the grant, and Jeff Horwitz for managing it.

The Perl Foundation (TPF) Grants Committee (GC) is searching for Grant Managers (GM). GM are volunteers (like the rest of TPF members) that help the interaction between TPF Grantees and TPF GC.

GM are assigned to a set of grantees, and GM are responsible for poking Grantees from time to time (hopefully once a month) asking for progress reports, and publishing them on this blog. They are also responsible for dispatch Grantees payments together with TPF Treasurer.

If you might be interested in this role and if you are e-mail responsive, please mail me at ambs [at] perlfoundation.org. Thank you.