The Perl Foundation

As many folks know, the Perl Foundation Grant Committee is responsible for awarding and managing grants to improve the Perl language and benefit the Perl community. What many don't know is how this works.

First, I'm Curtis "Ovid" Poe. You may have encountered me on Perlmonks or used some of my CPAN modules. I currently sit on the Perl Foundation steering committee and I'm the grant secretary for the grant committee. I was elected to the latter position after serving a couple of years as a grant manager. During that time, I oversaw grants for Maypole, Annocpan, PPI and many other projects. Without funding from the Perl Foundation, many of these projects may have been much smaller in scope or never existed.

Most folks probably aren't aware of this, but Stichting NLnet is sponsoring quite a bit of Parrot's development. We report to them every two months about the state of Parrot so they can feel comfortable with how it's going. Unfortunately, I had too much on my plate to be the grant manager for Parrot and Dave Rolsky volunteered to step in and help out. He now communicates the Parrot development status to NLNet every two months and ensures that we're paying out grant money only for work which is actually done.

From time to time people decide to leave the grant committee and new members join. Recently, Nicholas Clark, a long-time grant committee member, decided to step down. He'll be missed as his knowledge of both Perl and the community are extensive. However, we wound up electing two new grant committee members, Thomas Klausner and Ben Tilly. On the off chance you don't know who they are, I suppose I should tell you a bit about them.

Only one grant was approved this quarter, but it's fantastic. Nicholas Clark, the current 5.8 Pumpking has applied for an $11,000 grant to improve Perl 5. Some of what he intends to do:

• Fix bugs affecting Unicode handling, Class::DBI, Tk and PAR.
• Allow relocatable Perl installations, which permits developers to distribute applications complete with a bundled Perl.
• Support source filters as part of code references in @INC
• Complete lexical pragmas, a milestone on the way to 5.10
• Further memory saving for 5.10 - previous work saved >33% for hashes and arrays
• Merge Larry's p5-p6 work into core, which will allow others to start contributing to it.

The changes are extremely valuable and will lead to widespread benefit to Perl programmers. We're quite excited about this grant. There are few people more qualified than Nicholas to do this work and the price is a bargain.

On a personal note, I'm particularly excited about his plan to save the regular expression engine state. I've been bit by bugs caused by the regex engine not being re-entrant and I'm hoping this will fix my bugs. Read on for the full text of the grant application.

One of the grants the grant committee approved last year was to extend PPI towards a refactoring editor. At that time, we didn't have procedures in place to take the grant reports and post them to a common spot. Now that we have this blog, our intention is to post these reports regularly so you can see the bang you're getting for your buck.

What follows is Adam Kennedy's report on his PPI work.

I have just received the first report for Nicholas Clark's grant. So far, things are going rather well. Read on to see what Nicholas has done.

Here's the latest status update for Nicholas Clark's Improve Perl 5 grant. As usual, he's gotten quite a bit done.

Just a quick update about the grant applications for May, 2006. Regrettably, no applications were approved. We generally don't publish the rejected applications because we don't want to make the applicants feel awkward, but I do have the unenviable task of informing the applicants not only that their grants were not approved, but also giving them a rough summary of why the grants were not approved.

For this round, it typically boiled down to three things.

1. No grant amount listed. This is an automatic rejection.
2. Grant amounts too high. Rarely do we authorize $10K grants.
3. Unclear benefits to the Perl community at large.

The next round of grants will be voted on in August and I look forward to your applications! (Hopefully this bit of news won't be so daunting as to intimidate folks).

I was going to announce Nicholas Clark's progress on his Improve Perl 5 when I announced this quarter's grant votes. However, the summary below (including the TODO information) isn't quite accurate. It was sent to me on May 11th, and as of a May 20th email to me, I'm informed that even Nicholas' TODO items have been accomplished, along with documentation of user pragmata. His grant appears to be finished and a great success. Many thanks Nicholas!

It's that time again! If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it's worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org. Grant applications must be in by the last day of July and we will be awarding the grants at the beginning of September.

First, please read about how to submit a grant. Read that carefully as grants are often rejected if they don't meet the criteria. For example, if you want to submit improvements to a well-known project but there's no evidence that you have at least tried to work with the maintainers of that project, the grant will likely not be approved. You can also read through our rules of operation for a better idea of thee grant process.

My job as Parrot Grant Manager is basically to make prepare a report every two months for NLnet, who are the funders behind the big Parrot grant.

Here is the grant report for June and July of 2006:

The latest round of grant voting has ended and I've informed all of the applicants of the status of their grant. Two grants were approved this quarter "Porting PyYAML to Perl" and "Mango", a Web 2.0 ecommerce application built using the Handel and Catalyst frameworks. The full applications will be posted after this.

The PyYAML port is to be done by Ingy (Brian Ingerson) and was approved because frankly, YAML support in Perl ain't all that great and there are few better qualified that Ingy to get this done.

The Mango application will be put together by Chris Laco. The committee really liked this proposal in large part because it will be a great app that could have widespread potential outside of the Perl community. Many folks were initially drawn to Perl because they found useful code written in Perl and naturally turned toward the language. We'd like to continue that.

As usual, we'd love to hear your feedback on these.

Here's Brian Ingerson's "Port PyYAML to Perl" grant application.

Here's Christopher Laco's "Mango" grant application.

For those curious, the YAML grant's status is being tracked by Ingy döt Net at this wiki. I'll chase down more info on the Mango grant and post it here.

Here's the latest Parrot Grant Update ...

In August and September, Allison has been working on the PDD for IO, which she expects to finish sometime in October or November. Because IO, events, and threads are so inter-related, some of the IO work will spill over into work on the PDDs for events and threads as well.

This call for proposals is delayed because I managed to set up my calendar notification incorrectly. My apologies if this has inconvenienced anyone. Also, after this, I'll be on vacation for a week and a half, so I won't be able to respond right away to grant submissions, but I'll catch up with this when I get back.

If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it's worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org. Submission deadlines is the last day of November, voting starts in December and we will be awarding the grants by the beginning of January. I've fixed my calendar notification and we should be back on schedule after this.

First, please read about how to submit a grant. Read that carefully as grants are often rejected if they don't meet the criteria. For example, if you want to submit improvements to a well-known project but there's no evidence that you have at least tried to work with the maintainers of that project, the grant will likely not be approved. You can also read through our rules of operation for a better idea of thee grant process.

Sorry this hasn't been updated lately. Our company is shutting down their offices and I have to move to London. Needless to say, my life has been in a bit of a turmoil as I try to get things sorted out (excuses, excuses).

Now, on with the grant update:

Here's the latest grant update as sent to NLNet ...

During October and November, Allison has continued working on the PDD for IO, which she hopes to finish soon.

Parrot 0.4.7 was released on November 14th. This release includes design work on bytecode files, embedding, concurrency, and objects. The bytecode file PDD (PDD25) is complete, and is beginning to be implemented.

Grant vote results are in and one grant was awarded. The first Perl Foundation grant of 2007 has been award to Shlomi Fish for resolving outstanding issues in XML::RSS. Shlomi has worked with Ask Bjørn Hansen, the module's maintainer, to resolve some bugs in it in the past and now plans to tackle the rest of the work. Rosellyn Thompson is the grant manager assigned to this grant.

Below is the original grant application.

Chris Laco's Mango grant application work was delayed slightly, but he's now starting on it. Below is his latest grant update, as collected by his grant manager, Adrian Howard.

We have two grant updates (sort of) this time.

Adam Kennedy's "Extending PPI Towards a Refactoring Perl Editor" has no new news to report. This grant is currently stalled.

Shlomi Fish's work on "XML::RSS Cleanup", however, is going quite well. Read on for more information.

If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it's worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org. Submission deadline is the last day of February, voting starts in March and we will be awarding the grants by the beginning of April.

First, please read about how to submit a grant. Read that carefully as grants are often rejected if they don't meet the criteria. For example, if you want to submit improvements to a well-known project but there's no evidence that you have at least tried to work with the maintainers of that project, the grant will likely not be approved. You can also read through our rules of operation for a better idea of the grant process.

Desperately trying to catch up with everything needed for the grant committee and am (finally) getting around to posting grant updates for Ingy and Chris Laco. For Ingy's "Port PyYAML to Perl" grant:

Ingy's not been able to make much progress over the last month due to other commitments, but is now back in the saddle. He's aiming to do the the libyaml bindings first. This will likely get us to working code faster.

Chris Laco's Mango grant, however, has lots of great news.

Here's the latest grant update as sent to NLNet ...

The 0.4.8 release Parrot marked the completion of a design milestone, the IO PDD. This is a major accomplishment, as the design work on IO impacts much of Parrot's design, including areas such as concurrency and networking. This work was completed by Allison with help and review by Jerry Gay.

First off, let's get the bad news out of the way. Here's Adam's final report on the PPI refactoring editor:

It is with some sadness I think I will have to finally draw a line under this effort and consider it over. Without the appearance of a pure-Perl cross-platform (most likely Wx) programmer's text editor on the CPAN, I don't see how I can complete the proof of concept.

The entire grant was based on the availability of such an editor, and the administration overhead of getting it to the CPAN has meant that hasn't happened.

In summary, I believe most or all the secondary goals have been completed (caching support, various bits and pieces of PPI functionality, the rewriting of File::HomeDir, the creation of File::ShareDir, Module::Install::Share, File::UserConfig and a few other modules, and helping out with various PPI/Perl::Critic things).

The primary goal has failed (proof of concept refactoring Perl editor).

An unexpected additional goal has been completed, with the creation of Vanilla/Strawberry Perl Win32 distributions, bug-fixing a vast number of CPAN and core modules to make them work on Win32, and the creation of win32.perl.org.

Adam K

He was to be paid $5,000US for this grant, with $2,500 up front and the rest due on completion. Given that he didn't complete his grant, some might be surprised that we've decided to make the final payment any. What follows is why.

We're pleased to announce that we've selected Steve Peters as the recipient of the first Perl 6 microgrant. Steve has been instrumental in helping to ensure that Perl 5 has stayed incredibly portable for the past few years. Steve's starting to turn some of his attention to Parrot. You can find details of the project he's planning in the text of his grant application:

There are several problems currently with Parrot's portability, which may inhibit its adoption as a run-anywhere VM. This problem will be a major obstacle in the Perl6-to-Parrot solutions that have been proposed.

Some of these problems include:

• Failures to successfully link a Parrot executable with gcc on Cygwin.
• Failures to successfully link a Parrot executable with icc or suncc on Linux.
• Failures to successfully link a Parrot executable with Borland C++ on Windows.

These are the failures I have personally experienced. I suspect there may be additional problems on other OSes and platforms as well since there seems to be very spotty coverage of HP-UX and Solaris based on results seen on the Parrot smoke report website.

Having worked with the Perl 5 core for a few years now, I have a good deal of experience in this area. I currently smoke test Perl on four different operating systems with seven different compilers. I have worked to get Intel C++ and Sun Studio compiling Perl without failures on Linux. I am also currently working with Sun in their early access program to test out their new Sun Studio 12 compilers on both Linux and Solaris.

For completion of this grant, I believe the following would be the bare minimum needed for a successful project.

• Successful completion of a full Cygwin compile of Parrot and application of necessary patches to Parrot. Test failures should be in line with what is observed on Linux or Mac OS X. That is clean up any test failures that seem to be platform specific to Cygwin.
• Similarly, compiling Parrot with Intel C++ and Sun Studio 12 for Linux, application of any necessary patches, and cleanup of compiler specific issues.
• Compiling Parrot with Borland C++ on Windows with application of necessary patches to the Parrot core. Cleanup of compiler specific issues with necessary additional changes patched in the Parrot core.
• Investigation into gmake "-j" support to allow for parallel building of Parrot.

Additional planned work:

• Additional cleanup for other OSes including (but not limited to) NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD.
• Testing and cleanup for Solaris (x86 and Sparc) and HP-UX if needed. As I only have guest access for the majority of these platforms, the work is dependent on continued access to these systems. As long as I have the access, though, I plan to treat this deliverable similarly to the others.

Please join us in wishing him the best of luck with his project. We're really looking forward to seeing the results of this work.

If you're interested in submitting a Perl 6 microgrant proposal, you can find details here.

Here are the latest update from the Mango grant.

As a side note, we're working on a new process for getting grant information out even faster than we currently do (you might recall that we used to have none). If everyone signs off, this information should be much more timely.

The Perl Foundation is pleased to announce two new grant awards. The first is adding new policies to Perl::Critic. The second is improving the Smolder project.

Note that the second project involves the TAP::Parser module (which was known as TAPx::Parser at the time the grant application was submitted). This was a project I started, currently maintained on the CPAN by Andy Armstrong (I'm still involved, as are others). This is slated to be the replacement for Test::Harness. Because we're seeing more grant applications involving this module, I have decided that I will abstain from all future votes for applications which specifically require adding TAP::Parser support (if it's peripheral to the project, that's OK). Approving money for people integrating a project that I started doesn't pass my personal "smell test". This does mean that it's possible we'll have worthwhile projects which come up one vote short, but in this case, Smolder was unanimously approved by everyone else.

We're pleased to announce that we've selected Phil Crow as the recipient of the second Perl 6 microgrant. Phil is the hacker behind the Java::Swing module that allows Perl programmers to put a Java Swing GUI on their application without writing any Java and he'll be using this knowledge to convert Java declarations to Perl 6. You can find details of the project he's planning in the text of his grant application:

Tim Bunce has suggested that it would be nice to have a general purpose declaration translator from Java to Perl. In particular, he is interested in leveraging this tool to create a JDBC API for Perl 6 from the Java JDBC classes and interfaces. The result would then provide a strong foundation for the Perl 6 DBI.

I propose to write that translator. It would have two pieces:

• One would use the Java deparser (part of its standard development kit) to turn Java classes or interfaces into an internal structure
• The other half would turn that structure into valid Perl 6. Note that it would only translate class, interface, and method declarations, not code.

Success for this project will be a working translator that generates method declarations in Perl 6 from compiled Java .class files. While all cases might not be covered, at least the final product should not die when faced with the unexpected. The generated files will be tested using the then current version of Pugs.

This project is new and has only recently been discussed in response to the call for proposals. I'm sure I will have questions to direct to various Perl 6 mailing lists as the project progresses.

This microgrant is supported by additional sponsorship from Tim Bunce / DBI.

Please join us in wishing him the best of luck with his project. We're really looking forward to seeing the results of this work.If you're interested in submitting a Perl 6 microgrant proposal, you can find details here.

I am pleased to announce that Shlomi Fish has completed his XML::RSS cleanup grant. In his own words, Shlomi has summarised the work he's done and offers his thanks to those who helped him transform XML::RSS into a high quality tool for the community:

If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it's worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org. Because we're running a little late this time, submission deadline is June 8, 2007, voting starts immediately after. We will be awarding the grants by the beginning of July. Voting usually goes fairly quickly, so we don't anticipate a problem.

First, please read about how to submit a grant. Read that carefully as grants are often rejected if they don't meet the criteria. For example, if you want to submit improvements to a well-known project but there's no evidence that you have at least tried to work with the maintainers of that project, the grant will likely not be approved. You can also read through our rules of operation for a better idea of the grant process.

Since this update is so late, I'm taking the liberty of covering three months of Parrot work, rather than two. That means this report covers February through end of April of 2007.

Parrot has been sticking to its new monthly release schedule, which means that we saw three releases in this grant period, 0.4.9, 0.4.10, and 0.4.11.

Three more Perl 6 Microgrants have been awarded!

Jesse Vincent of Best Practical writes:

Flavio Glock will receive a travel microgrant to help him attend YAPC::EU and evangelize kp6 and the Perl 6 in Perl 6 effort.

Steve Pritchard will receive a microgrant to complete the RPM packaging of Parrot and Pugs for Fedora, and to submit those packages for inclusion in the official Fedora distribution. Steve will be blogging his progress at http://blog.stevecoinc.com/

Juerd Waalboer is the maintainer of feather.perl6.nl, the primary host for Pugs development. Juerd will receive a microgrant to purchase upgraded hardware for feather.

Five Perl 6 microgrants remain to be awarded, so if you've got a good idea, we want to hear about it. You can find out how to submit a proposal here: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2007/03/msg122448.html.

May and June saw the usual monthly releases of Parrot, 0.4.12 and 0.4.13. Between these two releases, there were numerous language updates, including PHP and Lisp. On the Perl 6 front, 0.4.13 was the first release where Parrot passed the Perl 6 sanity tests. This is an exciting achievement, because it means that Parrot supports enough of Perl 6 that the developers can start using Perl 6 to bootstrap its own implementation.

There were also many improvements to the Parrot internals, notably on the object implementation, as well as smaller improvements in the garbage collector, memory leak fixing, and general cleanup. The object work focused on implementing the new object metamodel documented in PDD15 and switching current object code to this new metamodel.

On the design side, there was significant work on the design for PMCs (PDD17), and Allison expects this to be finalized soon.

Parrot had a strong presence at the recent YAPC::NA conference in Houston, TX. There was almost a full day of talks devoted to Parrot, including presentations by chromatic, Project Manager Will Coleda, Patrick Michaud, and Parrot Architect Allison Randal.

No milestone payments were approved during this period.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Chris Dolan's Policies for Perl::Critic grant, awarded April 07, is now underway. Chris intends to add twenty policies that are inspired by Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices to Perl::Critic to help developers to make their code more maintainable.

Chris has written the first of the twenty policies funded by the grant, Perl::Critic::Policy::BuiltinFunctions::ProhibitComplexMapping, which insists that the block argument to map() has at most one statement.

Further details of the policies Chris intends to implement can be found in Perl::Critic's POD. You can also track Chris's work at http://perlcritic.tigris.org/svn/perlcritic/branches/Perl-Critic-1.xxx

If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it's worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org by the end of August. We will be awarding the grants by the beginning of October.

Following on from the success of his recent XML::RSS grant, Shlomi Fish has been awarded another grant to create a reusable parser for the syntax of MediaWiki, the popular open-source wiki engine that powers sites such as Wikipedia and Wikiquote. The deliverables of the grant are a CPAN module and a Kwiki plugin for using this MediaWiki syntax in Kwiki wikis, enabling people to create Perl projects that can parse its syntax and create compatible wikis. Shlomi's progress will be documented in future entries of this blog.