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.
(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.
It is with considerable pleasure that TPF announces today a Perl development grant to David Mitchell for the release of Perl 5.10.1. David's work through this grant will be:
The funding amount of this grant is USD $5000, which is meant to provide support for David at a half-time level over the 2-3 calendar months it is anticipated this work will require. David has been a Perl core hacker since 2001, and is the release manager (a.k.a. "pumpking") for the 5.10 series maintenance branch.
This grant is supported by Rafael Garcia-Suarez, the Perl 5.10 series development branch release manager, and Nicholas Clark, the Perl 5.8 series release manager. Nicholas will also be the grant manager for this grant, which means he will maintain communication with David to ascertain the continuing process of the grant work and will determine when the work milestones of the grant have been achieved.
Funding for this grant has been generously provided by Dijkmat BV, The Netherlands.
Google's Summer of Code 2008 is wrapping up now and I'm very pleased with how well The Perl Foundation's students and mentors have done. The five projects which survived the halfway point have all finished with great results.
Many thanks to all of the mentors and students as well as everyone in the community who helped or supported the process. Also, thanks to Google for putting on the program and to Richard Dice and Jim Brandt at TPF.
But the end is only the beginning. We should really get started on next year now. Perl needs to do a better job of attracting students, but I'll have to address these issues in another post.
Most of the students did a great job of blogging their progress, which I think is an important part of Summer of Code for the rest of the community. If you have been following along with any of the student projects, please drop me a note or leave a comment. I would love to hear more opinions from outside of the active SoC participants. Also, please thank the mentors and students for their work. Of course, they "know" you appreciate their effort -- but it really means something if you actually send them an e-mail or say thanks on irc.
For those just joining us, here is a run-down of the SoC projects and some links.
Flesh out the Perl 6 Test Suite
student: Adrian Kreher
mentor: Moritz Lenz
Blog | Code | Moritz's Recap
wxCPANPLUS
student: Samuel Tyler
mentors: Herbert Breunung and Jos Boumans
Blog | Code | CPAN distribution
Native Call Interface Signatures and Stubs Generation for Parrot
student: Kevin Tew
mentor: Jerry Gay
Mail | Code | (older branch)
Incremental Tricolor Garbage Collector
student: Andrew Whitworth
mentor: chromatic
Blog | Code
Math::GSL
student: Thierry Moisan
mentor: Jonathan Leto
Blog | Code | CPAN distribution | Jonathan's Recap
Here's my first Help Wanted entry. SOAP::Lite needs your help. Byrne Reese has posted a good assessment of the state of the SOAP::Lite. Read on for details.
I often hear this:
"I'd get involved in Perl, but all the cool stuff is done and there's no room to make a name for myself. No one needs another DBI module..."
or even:
"All the cool kids are using (Ruby/Python/TI-994A Extended Basic) because they don't have CPAN yet and they can become the uber-programmer for the cool modules."
Well, to these I say, "Nonsense!" There is a ton of work to be done for Perl today, right now. And it's crucially important work. So whenever I come across something that I think is really important, I'm going to post it with the heading 'Help Wanted.'
Criteria: This isn't going to be stuff like, "We need someone to fix this RT ticket for this module." I'm going to try to post stuff that I feel is truly important to Perl and would be useful to many people. I'll also try to post any progress if I hear about it.
Interested? Go check out the first posting for SOAP::Lite.
First, the traditional Perl Advent Calendar informs you about a snazzy module every day until the 25th, with requisite RSS feed for those of you practicing one of the three virtues this holiday season.
Next, for Catalyst users, or those who'd like to start, the Catalyst Advent Calendar brings a daily tip for those interested in this increasingly popular framework.
Finally, brian d foy has created a Perl Community calendar on Google Calendar. Follow it via XML, iCal, and HTML.
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