We have received a Hague grant request, submitted by Solomon Foster. Before the Board votes on this proposal we would like to get feedback and endorsements from the Perl community. Please leave feedback in the comments or send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org. Project Title: Numeric and Real Support Synopsis: This grant aims to refactor Rakudo's current numeric classes to support the Perl 6 specification's new Numeric

This was the oldest grant running. Ingy dot net was working intermittently on it presenting some of the results that were promised in the proposal but not them all. TPF and Ingy agreed to close the grant with a half payment for the work done. Ingy wrote a report on the work done. It can be read at https://www.socialtext.net/yaml/index.cgi?requiem_for_a_grant

For this quarter TPF had 7 grant proposals, from which 5 were voted for rejection, one for acceptance, and the final one will be kept for new evaluation in the next round. The five rejected grants are: "Creating a ctypes-Like Interface for Perl to External Subroutines":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/08/2009q3_grant_proposal_creating.html by Shlomi Fish "Enhancing CPANHQ":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/08/2009q3_grant_proposal_enhancin.html by Shlomi Fish "perl core memory improvements":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/02/2010q1_grant_proposal_perl_cor.html by Jim Cromie "Enhancing Perl 6 Pattern Matching":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/02/2010_grant_proposal_enhancing.html by Morris M. Siegel

Jonathan Worthington has successfully completed his Hague Grant for "Rakudo Signature Improvements":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/09/hague_grant_application_rakudo.html. This is his final report: Introduction A while back, I filed an "application":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/09/hague_grant_application_rakudo.html for a grant to work on a wide range of improvements to Rakudo's signature, capture and binding implementation, in order to improve performance, bring us in line with the specification and implement a range of features that we did not have support for. I have

David Mitchell has submitted a grant proposal, which if accepted would make use of a portion of the funding generously provided to TPF by "Booking.com":http://www.booking.com/. Before the Board votes on this proposal we would like to get feedback and endorsements from the Perl community. Please leave feedback in the comments or send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org. Grant Title: Fixing perl5 core bugs Name: David Mitchell **Amount

For this quarter TPF has three grant proposals that were not funded in 2009Q3 round and that will be discussed and voted again in this round, and four new grant proposals: "Creating a ctypes-Like Interface for Perl to External Subroutines":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/08/2009q3_grant_proposal_creating.html by Shlomi Fish "Enhancing CPANHQ":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/08/2009q3_grant_proposal_enhancin.html by Shlomi Fish "perl core memory improvements":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/02/2010q1_grant_proposal_perl_cor.html by Jim Cromie "Enhancing Perl 6 Pattern Matching":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/02/2010_grant_proposal_enhancing.html by Morris M. Siegel "Perl Compiler":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2010/02/2010_grant_proposal_perl_compi.html by Reini urban "CPAN

Perl Compiler Name: Reini urban Email: Duration: Until March 2011 Amount Requested: $1000 Synopsis Fix most of the remaining perl compiler, i.e. B::C, B::CC, B::Bytecode bugs. Improve documentation a bit. Maintain the planned compiler.perl.org site. Benefits to the Perl Community A working compiler. Faster startup time. Optionally faster run-time if the B::CC optimizations work out as expected. parrot? I've worked with them. I gave up. Better a half-ass perl5 compiler

CPAN reviews Name: Alexandr Ciornii Email: Amount Requested: $1200 Synopsis Many CPAN modules have good documentation, many have bad documentation. But there is no such thing as enough documentation. There are many good reviews, examples, descriptions outside CPAN. I propose to collect them and cataloguize. I want to make a site with links to reviews of CPAN modules. In general this site should be community-moderated, community-edited and allow users adding

Improve Dist::Zilla's Tests, Documentation, and Structure Name: Ricardo Signes Email: Amount Requested: $2000 Synopsis Dist::Zilla is a tool that helps Perl programmers build distributions for the CPAN. It eliminates boilerplate, handles packaging, interfaces with changelogs and version control, improves prerequisite management, and generally makes it easier to be a CPAN author. This grant will fund work to make it easier for new users to adopt Dist::Zilla and for Dist::Zilla itself

Enhancing Perl 6 Pattern Matching with Ideas from Snobol4 and Other Sources Name: Morris M. Siegel, Ph.D. Email: Amount Requested: $3000 The substance of my proposed alternative pattern-matching specification has already been essentially worked out as a self-funded research project, as it were. I felt this project was of such importance that it was worthwhile giving myself a sort of sabbatical to develop it. It has taken rather longer than

perl core memory improvements Name: Jim Cromie Email: Amount Requested: How much is your project worth? $3000 Synopsis Memory allocation enhancements in core Perl's variable namespace model is very flexible, users can: create vars, in any package, or in my scope, by naming them; give them complex values: my $foo share/assign/shallow-copy them: $main::bar $foo; crosslink or self ref them: $a $a other hairy stuff This

NOTE: **perl.org Request Tracker was down for about a week As this happened in the last days of the call for grants period we are extending it till the end of the week The Perl Foundation is looking at giving some grants ranging from $500 to $3000 in February/March 2010. In the past, we've supported Adam Kennedy's PPI, Strawberry Perl and Perl on a Stick, Nicholas Clark's work on Perl

Eric Wilhelm has finished his grant "improving learn.perl.org":http://news.perlfoundation.org/mt/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=18&tag=learn.perl.org&limit=20". He has written six tutorials from "Getting Started with Perl" to "Your First GUI Desktop Application". The six tutorials are "Getting Started with Perl":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/getting_started/ "Control, Structures, Scoping, and Subroutines":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/csss/ "Using and Creating Modules":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/modules/ "An Introduction to Objects":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/objects/ "Perl/CPAN Configuration Howto":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/configuration/ "Your First GUI Desktop Application":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/wxperl/ The tutorials are currently hosted "http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com, but if Eric finds a better permanent home for them, he

Follows the update from Vadim on his grant: I've implemented 'call' method for interpreter object, which takes already parsed parameters and passes them to tcl/tk interpreter. It is similar to 'eval' method, but it should be faster, and also safer to use, because there will be no need to protect/escape special characters before calls. Also, widget calls to tcl/tk library are based on this method. Also, 'tk' widgets could be

Eric Roode sent the following update: bq. The status is basically that the writing is taking much, much longer than I had expected. I had thought I'd be able to document a couple classes per hour; instead, it's taking me a few hours per class. I don't really know what to do to speed up the process, so I am just continuing to plug along. At the rate I'm going,

Given my high amount of work at the moment and the big number of grants not finished I decided to skip the fourth call for grants for 2009. I am sorry for any inconvenience.

Over the last two weeks, Eric has done a lot of things... bq. I've added the "CPAN and Perl Configuration Howto" to the site. Feedback so far has been good. I'm waiting to hear if there are stumbling points or if it leaves any important questions unanswered. bq. "http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/configuration/":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/configuration/ bq. The "Control, Structures, Scoping and Subroutines" tutorial is now complete. bq. "http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/csss/":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com/tutorials/csss/ bq. I've finished writing the tutorials and am

It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce, on behalf of Ricardo Signes, that the TPF-funded work on Pod::Elemental and Pod::Weaver is complete! Here's his final report: Just a few days after predicting that the months-old grant was half done, it became quite clear that the first half was much, much more difficult than the second. The initial grant proposal listed the following targets: clearly defined and

Eric sent me this update: bq. I've sent a handful of changes to Robert and have been asked not to change the page style as apparently there's some other initiative going on. bq. The perl-org-patches list has generated some conflicting changes for the new /tutorials/ page as well as the index.html and I'm trying to resolve that content. The "learnperl.scratchcomputing.com":http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com front page has a sketch of where I'm wanting the

After a strong start, work on Pod::Elemental and Pod::Weaver was quickly derailed by conference season, and then by a few non-technical distractions. I've gotten back to work, though, and quite a lot of progress has been made. The second major goal, "extensive tests for Pod::Elemental," is basically complete. Pod::Elemental is fairly well defined, documented, and tested, and can now be used to perform significant document mangling. The "PodPurler" for Dist::Zilla

Kieren Diment reports that the Perl Survey is ready for deployment. He's been hardening the application against abuse by bots, simplifying the original set of demographic questions, and writing new survey questions. Kieren hopes to be freer from distraction as work continues through the end of the year.

Eric sent this update: bq. I've written Combust::Spontaneously to make it possible for anyone to get a local apache-less server running perl.org's templating system in under 5 minutes. It is now on the CPAN. bq. 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. bq. --Eric More info about this

Jonathan Worthington writes: Introduction bq. If it weren't for the fact that you said you were going to do it, I would've doubted it could be done at all in current Parrot. pmichaud In many senses, this "Hague Grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/04/hague_perl_6_grant_request_tra.html was rather more challenging than my "last one":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/11/hague_grant_request_rakudo_dis.html. In the course of it, I've been dealing with major changes to some of the things most fundamental to any Perl

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":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/08/2009q3_grant_proposal_corporat.html by Curtis Jewell. This grant will be co-funded by TPF and Adam Kennedy. "wxPerl documentation":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/08/wxperl_documentation.html by Eric J. Roode. "Changing the Perl 5 optree build process into a

This is the last post presenting a report for all grants at once. Future reports will be posted by respective grant managers whenever they have relevant news. TPF expects grantees to report at least once each month. If you are a grantee, please, easy the task of your grant manager sharing news with him. If you are a grant manager and your grantee does not report for a long time,

After three extenuating days at YAPC::EU::2009, and after some rest time, finally had the time to prepare the list of grant proposals for the third quarter of 2009. We have seven proposals, that can be read in this blog: perl core memory improvements by Jim Cromie wxPerl Documentation by Eric J. Roode Improve the visual design of Perl websites by Jon Allen Corporate, Embedded, and Multi-user Perl on Windows by

Name: Jim Cromie Email: Amount Requested: How much is your project worth? $3000K Synopsis Memory allocation enhancements in core Perl is greedy wrt recycling sv-bodies; freed bodies are returned to an interpreter-global freelist, where they hang until process termination. Workloads which rotate through large populations of each body-type would be badly limited; there would be no memory left. While this workload profile is arbitrary, so is the limitation. More to

Name: Eric J. Roode, ROODE on CPAN. Email: or Amount Requested: $2500 for Q3 2009. Synopsis Write a lot of much-needed documentation for wxPerl. Benefits to the Perl Community Perl has a reputation as a language that is not suited for GUI development. This is silly; Perl is as suited for GUI as any other language. But the learning curve for most of Perl's GUI toolkits is steep,

Name: Jon Allen Email: Amount Requested: USD 3,000 Synopsis Produce a modern, visually appealing set of templates, stylesheets, and other assets that Perl website owners can easily use and adapt to achieve a stylish look and feel, regardless of the back-end technologies powering each individual site. Benefits to the Perl Community Presentation and visual design forms a strong and lasting impression on website visitors. Unfortunately, the 1990s style of many

Name: Curtis Jewell Email: Amount Requested: US $5000. Synopsis Enhance Strawberry Perl so that it can be customized for different environments, and silently embedded inside of other corporate and open source projects. Benefits to the Perl Community With the upgrade to a .msi installer for Strawberry Perl, it is now possible to solve many outstanding issues and expand Windows Perl in new directions. These include greater compatibility with corporate environments,

Name: Gerard Goossen Email: Amount Requested 5,000 Synopsis This project is to change the Perl 5 optree build process into a step where the parser generates an Abstract Syntax Tree and a step where the executable code in the form of a list of function pointers is generated from the AST. Because this project is refactoring of a major part of the Perl 5 core, a good benchmark of

Name: Shlomi Fish Email: Amount Requested: $1500 Synopsis CPANHQ a community-driven, meta-data-enhanced interface to CPAN. Benefits to the Perl Community The current CPAN interfaces http://search.cpan.org/ kobesearch, and the rest of the CPAN services that various individuals have set up are not integrated, are not based on enough meta-data, are not enough community-driven and are generally lacking. As a result of all this, some people started the "Rethinking CPAN" effort: http://www.google.com/search

Name: Shlomi Fish Email: Amount Requested: $1500. Synopsis Develop a powerful Foreign Function Interface for Perl 5, similar to Python's ctypes. Benefits to the Perl Community ctypes provides a very handy way to call hard-coded subroutines in shared libraries, but only for Python. Having a similar module for Perl will benefit Perl 5 programmers who will be able to call subroutines in C and similar compiled languages from their Perl

Dear all, I am sorry to inform that I am busy with YAPC::EU::2009 organization. This means that this time we will not have grants updates, and that grants evaluation for this quarter will start later two weeks. #grants

Grants updates: h3. "Port PyYAML to Perl":http://www.perlfoundation.org/ingy_dot_net_port_pyyaml_to_perl Ingy döt Net No updates from Ingy. h3. "Fixing Bugs in the Archive::Zip Perl Module":http://www.perlfoundation.org/fixing_bugs_in_the_archive_zip_perl_module Alan Haggai Alavi No updates from Grant Manager. h3. "Test::Builder 2":http://www.perlfoundation.org/test_builder_2 Michael G Schwern No updates from Schwern. h3. "Perl cross-compilation for linux and wince":http://www.perlfoundation.org/vadim_konovalov_perl_cross_compilation_for_linux_and_wince Vadim Konovalov No updates from Vadim. If you know Vadim, please poke him. We need to know what is happening with him. h3.

Grants updates: h3. "Port PyYAML to Perl":http://www.perlfoundation.org/ingy_dot_net_port_pyyaml_to_perl Ingy döt Net No updates, this time. h3. "Fixing Bugs in the Archive::Zip Perl Module":http://www.perlfoundation.org/fixing_bugs_in_the_archive_zip_perl_module Alan Haggai Alavi Alan Haggai has been improving the new named argument features and adding lots of automated tests. A new release of Archive::Zip, with many of his improvements, is now available on the CPAN. Currently he is updating the POD to reflect the changes. Next he will

The Perl Foundation is looking at giving some grants ranging from $500 to $3000 in August/September 2009. In the past, we've supported Adam Kennedy's PPI, Strawberry Perl and Perl on a Stick, Nicholas Clark's work on Perl internals, Jouke Visser's pVoice, Chris Dolan on Perl::Critic and many others You don't have to have a large, complex, or lengthy project. You don't even have to be a Perl master or guru.

Dear all, thanks for the grant managers who sent me updates, but I had some problems with my laptop and things were not easy. Hope to get back on track in 15 days.

Grants updates, in fact, updates IX, X and XI, as we had a small stop. h3. "Port PyYAML to Perl":http://www.perlfoundation.org/ingy_dot_net_port_pyyaml_to_perl Ingy döt Net Ingy update: I'm a bit behind on finishing YAML::Perl. This is due mostly to a focus on TestML. So far I have the spec: http://ingydotnet.github.com/testml/spec/ and a Perl 5 implementation: http://github.com/ingydotnet/testml-pm/ These are undergoing last minute changes. _The reason I'm doing this and telling you about it,

After grant proposals comment by the community and vote taking place in the Grant Committee, these are the results. Rejected proposals: "Project nival ":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/05/2009q2_grant_proposal_project.html "Project ruddy ":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/05/2009q2_grant_proposal_project_1.html "Perl 6 Pages":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/05/2009q2_grant_proposal_perl_6_p.html Funded proposal: "Pod Mangling Utility Improvements":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/05/2009q2_grant_proposal_pod_mang.html

It is with great pleasure to announce the approval of the latest "Ian Hague grant for Perl 6 development":http://www.perlfoundation.org/ian_hague_perl_6_development_grants, entitled "'Traits, Introspection and More Dispatch Work For Rakudo.'":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/04/hague_perl_6_grant_request_tra.html This grant goes to "Jonathan Worthington":http://www.jnthn.net/, who has already "successfully finished":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/04/hague_perl_6_grant_for_jonatha.html one Hague grant. The grant manager for this grant will be "Patrick Michaud":http://www.pmichaud.com/, the lead architect of "Rakudo Perl 6":http://www.rakudo.org/, the "Perl 6":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi implementation effort on top of the "Parrot virtual

The TPF board of directors wants to provide a progress update on discussion regarding providing support to Richard Dice to work on TPF and Perl community issues. The original public announcement and request-for-comment is "found here.":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/04/request_for_comment_tpf_to_eng.html The new version of this proposal is available here It has been revised considerably based on community comment and discussion within TPF. Highlights of the changes between the original version and the current one

That time of the month is back. This quarter we had two new grant proposals, and two grant proposals that were maintained from last round. We expect the community to comment on these grants accordingly with their relevance. Please comment on each grant proposal post: "Perl 6 Pages":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/05/2009q2_grant_proposal_perl_6_p.html "Pod Mangling Utility Improvements":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/05/2009q2_grant_proposal_pod_mang.html "Project nival ":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/05/2009q2_grant_proposal_project.html "Project ruddy ":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2009/05/2009q2_grant_proposal_project_1.html

Project ruddy Name: Igor Sanchez-Puls and Rene Sanchez-Puls. Amount Requested: Front end 1000 Back end 1000 Total 2000 Synopsis The name ruddy comes from a kind of dove. Ruddy is intended to be version 0 of a nntp/rss reader an a web based email system. Benefits to the Perl Community It will be an extensible web mail system written with perl and jquery,

Project nival Name: Igor Sanchez-Puls and Rene Sanchez-Puls. Amount Requested: Front end 1000 Back end 1000 Total 2000 Synopsis The name nival comes from a kind of owl. Nival is intended to be version 0 of a Content Management System Benefits to the Perl Community It will be an extensible CMS written with perl and jquery, allowing to build sites in an

Pod Mangling Utility Improvements Name: Ricardo Signes Email: Amount Requested: $2000 Synopsis This grant is for the completion of design and implementation of basic versions of three pieces of software currently under development: Pod::Elemental Pod::Weaver Dist::Zilla::Plugin::PodWeaver All three modules exist and have been in use by a number of people for some time. The main thrust of the grant is to improve the usability and reliability of Pod::Weaver. Pod::Weaver is

Project Title: Perl 6 Pages Name: Herbert Breunung Email: Amount Requested: 600$ € Synopsis comprehensive lexicon-like tutorial Benefits to the Perl Community It will become easy to learn Perl6, because this way people can easily grab the bits they want to learn now about Perl 6. Once ready it may become also a communication channel with people not so involved into perl 6 Deliverables 8-10 larger Pages in the TPF

Coming off the completion of his first Hague grant, Jonathan Worthington has submitted a request for a new Ian Hague Perl 6 development grant for his proposal "Traits, Introspection and More Dispatch Work For Rakudo". A part of the Hague grant process is that submitted grant requests may, as opted by the submitter, be provided for public and community comment. Jonathan's grant request is included here, below. Any interested Perl

In late November 2007 Jonathan Worthington submitted a "Hague Perl 6 Grant proposal":http://www.perlfoundation.org/ian_hague_perl_6_development_grants entitled "'Rakudo Dispatch and Role Enhancements'":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/11/hague_grant_request_rakudo_dis.html. I am pleased to announce that Jonathan submitted his final Hague grant report yesterday and it was approved and accepted by chromatic, the grant manager for the grant. This successfully completes this Hague Grant for Perl 6 development. We thank Jonathan for his great work on this grant and his efforts