Last week, we reported that rt.cpan.org would be moving from its old home, and that it would be hosted by Best Practical, the makers of RT. The timeline we gave was "will be done sometime in early March," but fortunately, the process has gone very well and is now just about complete. Within a few hours from now, rt.cpan.org will point to the new instance, where all the old data

Since the announcement of the upcoming closure of rt.cpan.org, we've looked at what could, should, or must be done to keep it available in one form or another. After looking at a few options, The Perl Foundation has voted to contract Best Practical to take over the hosting of the CPAN RT instance. Starting immediately, they will be porting the data to their hosting, upgrading the RT instance to the

Kieren Diment has published his final report for the 2008Q4 Perl Survey grant. His report includes links to the survey findings and a Leximancer report

Kieren has posted his Week 2 Report on the Perl Survey, and is very happy with the responses so far: 2500 responses in under a week. With just another week to run, he's hoping to get responses from users outside the core community, so please pass along a link to the Perl Survey to the Perl users you know.

Kieren Diment's Perl Survey Grant work has led to the first new Perl Survey since the original 2007 survey. You can take the survey, and we encourage you to do so. Kieren hopes to deliver early analysis of the gathered data in early June at the German Perl Workshop. You can read Kieren's announcement in his own words on his blog.

Ricardo Signes reports that all work on his 2010 Q1 grant to improve the Dist::Zilla distribution builder is complete, with all work complete, tested, and released for some time into the CPAN. His complete and detailed final report can be read online.

The promised new Dist::Zilla tutorial has been posted on the new Dist::Zilla home page. 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.

Ricardo has now been working on his grant for nearly four weeks. Of the nine inch-stones included in the original proposal, five are complete One has had work done against it, but as more input has been gathered on how to proceed, it's become clear that the rest of this work will be done outside the scope of the grant. Two goals remain to be done, as does the user's

Ricardo began work on his grant at the beginning of the month and has made steady progress, completing the first two deliverables and has begun writing core tests, which should be done over the next few weeks. Has published status updates every few days so far and plans to continue doing so.

Kieren is presently finalizing code for the new Perl Survey and plans to have the new system up and operating soon, when he will conduct a pilot program to shake out the kinks in the project. After that, all that remains is to react to the results of the pilot, run the survey proper, and analyze the final data gathered from it. The source code is currently visible on GitHub.

Alan Haggai's work on the Archive::Zip library is complete. Numerous onerous bugs have been corrected, and the library can now handle far more kinds of data. A developer release should reach the CPAN soon, hopefully to be followed in short order by a new complete release of the library.

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

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.