As you might have noticed, TPF has been granting money for some big tasks, like funding Nicholas Clark or Dave Mitchel's work on Perl 5. Nevertheless, TPF has a Grants Committee with its own budget, to give grants for smaller projects, ranging from $500 to $3000. With this amount we do not expect to fund full-time work, but instead, use it as an incentive to complete some specific task. Therefore,

I am pleased to announce that The Perl Foundation has accepted Tony Cook's grant application for "Maintaining Perl 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/05/grant-application-maintaining.html. As always the application was considered after a public consultation and feedback period. I would like to thank everyone who took the time to view, assess, and provide feedback on the application. This grant was awarded from money previously raised for the "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund, an initiative maintained by

In accordance with the terms of my grant from TPF this is the monthly report for my work on improving Devel::Cover covering May 2013. In May Perl 5.18.0 was released. 5.18.0 introduced a new padrange operator and I had failed to note the full implications for Devel::Cover. So, a couple of days after 5.18.0 was released I released Devel::Cover 1.03 which works correctly with the new operator, and contains a

Nicholas Clark writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the April period. I started the month looking at the Unicode Names code. At Karl's suggestion I changed it to parse the UnicodeData.txt file properly. Previously it had hardcoded various constants, particularly related to the CJK ideographs and Hangul syllables. The CJK ranges in Unicode have increased in the past, and so it's possible that they will

Dave Mitchell writes: This month was mostly spent on removing global state from the regex engine, making re-entrantcy less error-prone. The extract from the merge commit description below gives you all the details you could ever want. Apart from that I spent a few hours re-enabling Copy-on_Write by default post the 5.18.0 release, plus a few other bits and pieces. It turns out that I have finally used up all

It took some time to get the grant results. In fact, grantees are aware of the status of their grants for about a week, but we were dealing with some internal details before posting the results. In this round the Grant Committee did not vote for rejection of any grant. That is good, but the committee does not have funds to accept all grants at once. This lead to a

We have received the following grant application, under the "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund, from Tony Cook. Before we vote 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: Maintaining Perl 5 Name: Tony Cook Synopsis Free up one of the Perl 5 core's contributors to

Dave Mitchell writes: This month I worked on three 5.18 blocker tickets; all three being regressions related to my jumbo re_eval fix back in 5.17.1. The first, which I continued working on from last month, was the "Regexp::Grammars" bug. Basically, my reworking of the implementation assumed that a constant string segment like "foo" in /foo..../ would indeed be constant; but in the presence of bc. use overload::constant qr sub bless

Joel Berger wrote: Alien::Base Final Report Summary With this report I end my grant for Alien::Base. I consider it to be a reasonable success and have hope that the project will continue further. It became, as perhaps I should have expected, a larger project than anticipated; the problems were rarely the anticipated ones. In the end Alien::Base faced two major problems: compile-time linking of the library and the localization of

For this quarter, TPF Grants Committee have four different proposals. Who invite the Perl Community to comment on the proposals and their relevance to the community. Please comment on each grant on their specific page. "YACT Yet Another Conference Tool":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/05/2013q2-gp-yact---yet-another-c.html by Torsten Raudssus _ "rpm.perl.it":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/05/2013q2-gp-rpmperlit.html by _Jozef Kutej "Review of Perl Web Frameworks":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/05/2013q2-gp-review-of-perl-web-f.html by Neil Bowers "Next Release of Pinto With Key Features":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/05/2013q2-gp-next-release-of-pint.html by Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer

Name: Torsten Raudssus Amount Requested: $3000 Synopsis The current Act software and their instances are an often discussed topic in the world of Perl. The migrating of those instances, and the move forward to more modern Perl solutions in the system are often discussed. Last year we were able to address and start a concept at the Quack and Hack Europe 2012, we called it YACT Yet Another Conference Toolkit,

Name: Jozef Kutej Amount Requested: 2000 Synopsis Create similar page to http://deb.perl.it/ for RPM world. Benefits to the Perl Community For many sysadmins it's pretty common task to look for and install Perl distribution from Linux OS packages and only the rest via some CPAN shell. It would save them a lot of time if they can get this install instruction instantly via a web service. Deliverables http://rpm.perl.it/ RPM-PM distribution

Name: Neil Bowers Amount Requested: $1500 Synopsis A review of the main modern web frameworks for Perl, somewhat in the style of the other reviews I've done: http://neilb.org/reviews/ Benefits to the Perl Community A comparison of the main web frameworks, with the same sample application available for all of them in github. This will help people make informed decisions, and hopefully encourage more people to "have a go" at web

Name: Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer Amount Requested: $3000.00 Synopsis Pinto is a turnkey solution for constructing and managing local CPAN-like repositories of Perl modules. This purpose of this grant proposal is to obtain funding for development of the next release of Pinto, which will include specific features described below. The Pinto project is less than 2 years old, but it has already gained a modest user base and is potentially relevant

Nicholas Clark writes: gcc 4.8.0 was released on 22nd March. This version of gcc has integrated Address Sanitizer, a Google project to provide a fast runtime heap and stack validation tool. I set it off building gcc from source, which pleasingly worked first time on the system I chose for the task. In turn blead built with it without problems, which is good in itself, and a known good starting

The North American Yet Another Perl Conference is still seeking a few more sponsors to help make YAPC a success this year. "Benefits of being a sponsor":http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/sponsorship.html include increasing your brand awareness, recruitment, and giving back to a language that give you so much. There are many different "levels of sponsorship ":http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/levels-of-sponsorship.html with various perks available. So, please "become a sponsor":http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/become-a-sponsor.html today.

TPF is looking for contributions to the Outreach Program for Women and I am pleased to announce that Renée Bäcker has started us off with a pledge of 1000 Euros. Together with existing funding this gets us one intern so far in the first round, and a opening for the second. Now we need additional generous donations to keep this rolling. If you would like to donate to this program

Dave Mitchell writes: This month I mainly worked on one of the 5.18 blocker tickets; in this case how bq. overload::constant qr sub interacts with "constant" regexes such as qr/foo/ and qr/foo if the sub replaces constant strings like "foo" with an overloaded object. It turns out this was something I hadn't anticipated in my re_eval reworking, and my code didn't handle it at all well. I'm now about 3/4

Nicholas Clark writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the February period. The first significant thing I worked on in February was a detailed review of Peter Martini's work towards an API for subroutine signatures. In particular, I wondered how much of the existing call checker hooks they could use. In turn, I wondered whether the call checker hooks were robust against some of the torture

Ricardo Signes' "Perl QA Hackathon":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2013/02/perl-5-grant-application-trave-1.html grant has been successfully completed and closed. Details regarding the grant may be found on "his blog":http://rjbs.manxome.org/rubric/entry/1992. Please consider "making a donation of any amount":https://secure.donor.com/pf012/give to help support projects such as this. Details regarding the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund may be found on "The Perl Foundation's web site":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund.