The Perl Foundation has a new mailing address! We are working to get contact information on all of our sites updated. Please update your records:

Yet Another Society d/b/a The Perl Foundation
340 S LEMON AVE #6055
WALNUT, CA 91789
UNITED STATES

1. Manual for Game Development with SDL Perl by Kartik Thakore
2. Perlbal documentation by José Castro and Bruno Martins
3. Perl 6 Tablets by Herbert Breunung
4. Improve Parrot Embed/Extend Subsystem Tests and Documentation by Jonathan "Duke" Leto
5. CPAN to deb autopackaging by Jozef Kutej

• FRDCSA Initial Release by Andrew John Dougherty
• SF.pm Funding by Fred Moyer
• YAC (YACCMS (Yet Another Catalyst CMS))) by Ricardo Filipo
• Perl 6 book in russian by Naim Shafiev and Zahatski Aliaksandr

I am pleased to announce that Patrick Michaud's Hague Grant for Lists, Iterators, and Parcels has been accepted. Will Coleda has agreed to be the grant manager for this project.

I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on this proposal.

Dave Mitchell writes:

As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the July period.

This month was mainly spent on providing a general fix for the weak backreferences in stashes globs and CVs. This means that in general there are likely to be less crashes when doing odd things with stashes and globs.

Over the first 21 weeks I have now averaged about 17 hours per week, slightly less than the nominal 20. I have used up approx 70% of the hours allocated to the grant.

Report for period 2010/07/01 to 2010/07/31 inclusive

Summary

Effort (HH::MM):

7:40 diagnosing bugs
62:45 fixing bugs
0:00 reviewing other people's bug fixes
0:00 reviewing ticket histories
5:20 review the ticket queue (triage)
-----
75:45 Total

Numbers of tickets closed:

3 tickets closed that have been worked on
0 tickets closed related to bugs that have been fixed
0 tickets closed that were reviewed but not worked on (triage)
-----
3 Total

Short Detail

54:40 [perl #58530] Bus error with constant + overload + stash manipulation + bless ]
8:05 [perl #75716] overload removes tainting
2:40 [perl #76540] panic: free from wrong pool when using a constant in a print statement
5:00 [perl #76716] Hash assignment can zap weak references to the hash
5:20 [TRIAGE]

I am pleased to announce that Solomon Foster has successfully completed his Hague Grant for Numeric and Real Support. I would like to thank Solomon and his grant manager, Jonathan Worthington, for all their work on this project.

Solomon Foster writes:

Introduction

While I worked on this grant, Rakudo has matured into a capable compiler ready to go out into the world as Rakudo Star. The work done under this grant ensures it will have a solid implementation of the S32 Numeric specification. And, as is usually the case when part of the Perl 6 specification is implemented for the first time, my experiences doing so have led to improvements and clarifications.

Deliverables Status

All deliverables have been achieved, and some additional work completed as well.

D1. The Numeric role is now in place as the root of all number types in Rakudo. Furthermore, the Numeric spec has been modified to include casting methods, the trigonometric base conversion methods, and a tentative approach to allow Numeric types that do not know of each other to be sorted together.

D2. The Real role is also in place. All of the built-in numeric types other than Complex now do Real. In addition to cleaning up the Real spec a bit, I introduced the Bridge casting method to make it very easy to write a new Real type which is fully interoperable with any other properly-coded Real type.

D3. Int, Rat, and Num now do the Real role in Rakudo. So far this seems to work very well, particularly because Int and Rat have many of their methods provided by Real.

D4. Complex is now a Numeric type composed of two Reals. Again, this is a good fit, a testament to the solid fundamental design of this area of the spec.

D5. The trig functionality is now implemented in Num and Complex, with Cool forwarding trig methods to the Numeric cast of their arguments, and Real forwarding them to the Bridge cast. In practice, this means that any Real type other than Num automatically gets its trig functionality by delegation to Num, though the Bridge approach allows implementations to select a different type to handle this.

D6. I added the real-bridge.t test file to the spectests to test that an arbitrary new Real type will easily fit properly into the existing scheme. I didn't add a Numeric-specific test file, as fewer tests were required there and they seemed to blend naturally into existing test files.

D7. With approximately 15,000 tests deleted or added, by far the biggest test changes were to the trig tests. I overhauled them to cover more usage cases while using far fewer actual test cases. In the process I found several trig bugs and fixed them.

In addition to this, I fixed the long-broken handling of long numeric constants with decimal points in Rakudo, as it turned out to be a major impediment to revising the trig tests. Though the resulting patch needs to be refactored, it represents a major improvement in an area users are likely to encounter.

Dissemination

I have written fourteen blog posts on the Numeric work, as well as remaining active on the #perl6 channel. I was also part of the Perl 6 contingent at YAPC::NA.

Conclusions

This grant has advanced the state of the art in Rakudo, both in terms of the numerics classes themselves and in terms of the bugs turned up and fixed in the general implementation of roles. It has improved the specification and the test suite. In addition, both the Numeric and Real roles are implemented in almost pure Perl 6, meaning that they should be usable with only minor tweaks in any sufficiently advanced Perl 6 implementation. I feel this work has been a solid success.

• Perl 6 Tablets, by Herbert Breunung
• FRDCSA Initial Release, by Andrew John Dougherty
• SF.pm Funding, by Fred Moyer
• Manual for Game Development with SDL Perl, by Kartik Thakore
• Perlbal documentation, by José Castro and Bruno Martins
• CPAN to deb autopackaging, by Jozef Kutej
• Improve Parrot Embed/Extend Subsystem Tests and Documentation, by Jonathan "Duke" Leto
• YAC (YACCMS (Yet Another Catalyst CMS))), by Ricardo Filipo
• Perl 6 book in russian, by Naim Shafiev and Zahatski Aliaksandr
  

Perl 6 book in russian

Name:

Naim Shafiev, Zahatski Aliaksandr

Email:

[hidden email] [hidden email]

Amount Requested:

2000 $

Synopsis

Perl6 has reached development stage when on it is possible to program. The release of the version "Rakudo Star" for developers confirms it. At the given stage of development of language, it is important that the information on it was as it is possible is accessible to programmers, and also that who is interested in new technologies.

The permit preliminary on use of materials perl6-book [1] is obtained. However we plan to include own materials and working out examples in the book.

Also the book is opened for all Russian-speaking authors writing about perl6.

YAC (YACCMS (Yet Another Catalyst CMS)))

Name:

Ricardo Filipo

Email:

[hidden email]

Amount Requested:

US$ 3.000

Synopsis

A realy killer CMS. So simple! So usefull!

use YAC;

my $web = new YAC; $web->run(); # go to web!

Improve Parrot Embed/Extend Subsystem Tests and Documentation

Name:

Jonathan "Duke" Leto.

Email:

[hidden email]

Amount Requested:

$1500

Synopsis

Currently the Parrot [0] Embedding subsystem is under-tested and under-documented. This grant proposes to add documentation for all public Embed/Extend API functions, write tests to increase the code coverage statistics for the Embed/Extend API to at least 95%, and update the Parrot Developer Docs (PDDs) [1] where errors or omissions are found. Any bugs found on the way that cannot be easily fixed will be reported on the Parrot Trac bug-tracker with test cases.

CPAN to deb autopackaging

Name:

Jozef Kutej

Email:

[hidden email]

Amount Requested:

$3000

Synopsis

The aim of the project would be to create automatic CPAN distribution to Debian deb packaging system. Then use it to autopackage and backport at least 50% of the CPAN distributions resulting in a Debian repository with multiple thousand Perl related packages.

Perlbal documentation

Name:

José Castro Bruno Martins

Email:

[hidden email] [hidden email]

Amount Requested:

USD $ 2.500 (half for each of us)

Synopsis

Perlbal!

"It processes hundreds of millions of requests a day just for LiveJournal, Vox and TypePad and dozens of other "Web 2.0" applications."

It works great as a load balancer, wonderfully as a reverse proxy, marvellously as a web server.

If you know how to use it.

Perlbal lacks the documentation for even the simplest of tasks. Beginners can't possibly be expected to install and configure it by themselves, let alone write a plugin or accomplish some heavier task. At least not without losing some sanity.

However, all of these tasks are in fact easy ones.

But again, if you know how to do them.

This proposal aims at documenting several aspects of Perlbal and making several lives easier.

Manual for Game Development with SDL Perl

Name:

Kartik Thakore

Email:

[hidden email]

Amount Requested:

$1500

Synopsis

This project will improve the Game Development tutorials for Perl using the SDL library. The primary goal is to introduce newcomers to Game Development in Perl. The secondary goal is to attract people to try Perl as a Game Scripting and Prototyping language.

Grant Proposal for SF.pm Funding

Name:

Fred Moyer

Email:

[hidden email]

Amount Requested:

$2,500

Synopsis

#!/usr/bin/sf/perl

use strict; use warnings;

use PM; use App::PM::Announce; use DateTime; use LWP;

my $group = PM->new({ name => 'SF.pm' });

foreach my $month qw( jan feb mar apr may jun jul aug sep oct nov dec ) {

    my $date = DateTime->new( month_abbrev => $month, day => 'Tuesday',
                              time => '7pm', week => 4, );

    my @speakers = qw( thaljef ddalescu dlowe phred drforr hachi );
    my @dinners  = qw( indian pizza thai );
    my @drinks   = qw( soda beer water juice );

    my $count = int(rand(
        LWP->get('http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Perl-Mongers/')
            ->content
            =~ m/(\d+)\sPerl\sMongers/s
    ));

    my $meeting = $group->meeting->new({
        date           => $date,
        speaker        => $speakers[int(rand(scalar(@speakers)))],
        food           => $dinners[int(rand(scalar(@dinners)))],
        attendee_count => $count,
        books          => $group->sponsor->get('oreilly')->new_releases,
        drinks         => $drinks[int(rand(scalar(@drinks)))] x 2,
        venue          => LWP->get('http://www.sixapart.com'),
    });

    $meeting->run( sub => {
        my $event = shift || die 'object method required';
        warn($group->announcements( qw( events jobs conferences ) );
        $event->speaker->talk(duration => { min => 45 } );
        $event->speaker->talk->questions;
        $event->close;
        $group->cleanup;
      }
    );

    $group->leaders->prepare( sub => {
        my @leaders = @_;
        $leaders{'president'}->post_announcements;
        $leaders{'speaker_cochair'}->find_speakers;
        $leaders{'toolsmith'}->sharpen_tools;

        App::PM::Announce->new( $group->next_meeting );
    }

}

foreach $local_perl_shop ($group->city->companies ) {

    $local_perl_shop->get_involved;
    $local_perl_shop->hire_perl_programmers;
    $local_perl_shop->revenue++ for qw( q1 q2 q3 a4 );
}

FRDCSA Initial Release

Name:

Andrew John Dougherty

Email:

[hidden email] [hidden email]

Amount Requested:

$2250 +- $750 is how much is needed to release it, but a full computation of its value is not known to me - although the OFCS system designed by Teddy Goldenberg and soon-to-be implemented by the system-implementor codebase would be able to make a more informed estimate.

Synopsis

The FRDCSA consists of, among other things, over 1700 Perl5 modules in various stages of completion that operate in a tightly interwoven fashion. There are many entire systems for novel and important applications, especially from various subjects in Artificial Intelligence, as well as wrappers and APIs for other useful systems. Unfortunately, owing to their interdependence, lack of tests and documentation, need for a systematic renaming and deidentification - distributing them through CPAN has not yet been accomplished, although most of the software required to compute their distribution has been written. I seek a grant to facilitate their release either in majority or totality.

Perl 6 Tablets

Name:

Herbert Breunung

Email:

[hidden email]

Amount Requested:

$840

Synopsis

A thematically sorted Perl 6 compendium/lexicon, readable like a in depth tutorial, but optimized for finding missing bits of information. Appendices give several angles to search content.