Nicholas Clark writes: Sorry for the delay in this report I've been ill, been away, been ill while away, and generally disrupted, and I wasn't the only one ill in the house. Fortunately everyone is well again, and the backlog of other tasks is considerably reduced. Zombie undead global backref destruction panics strike again. I don't know what it is with these critters, but another variant turned up, in almost

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the March period. Spent the month successfully bringing run-time regex code blocks into the new way of doing things. My previous work on this had handled the cases where the code appears within a literal regex, e.g. bq. /ab $r qr/xy /z$r/; In all the above cases, the code block is parsed and compiled by the

We have received the following grant application from Paul Johnson. 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. Name: Paul Johnson Project Title: Improving Devel::Cover Synopsis: In the past few months Booking.com has donated €100,000 to The Perl Foundation to aid the further development

I am pleased to announce that Nicholas Clark's "request":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/02/grant-extension-request---impr.html to extend his "Improving Perl 5 grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/08/grant-proposal-improving-perl.html has been successful. This extension would not have been possible without the generous contributions that have been made to the "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund. I would like to thank everyone who has supported this fund and in particular "Booking.com":http://www.booking.com/, "cPanel":http://www.cpanel.net/, "craigslist":http://www.craigslist.org/, "Dijkmat":http://www.dijkmat.nl/, "Liquid Web":http://www.liquidweb.com/, "Net-A-Porter":http://www.net-a-porter.com/, the "Oslo Perl Mongers":http://oslo.pm.org/, "perl-services.de":http://www.perl-services.de/, and the "Vienna

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the February period. I spent a couple of days rebasing my davem/re_eval branch to incorporate recent changes to blead, but apart from that didn't do anything, due to a mixture of illness, being stuck, and doing other things. The good news is that the illness and stuck-ness are both ended, so I have started work on the

Nicholas Clark has requested an extension of $20,000 for his "Improving Perl 5 grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/08/grant-proposal-improving-perl.html. The grant, that is currently running, is on track to finish successfully at the end of March. This extension would allow Nicholas to devote another 400 hours to the project. Details of the work completed so far can be read in the following blog posts: "Month 1":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/10/improving-perl-5-report-for-mo.html "Month 2":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/11/improving-perl-5-report-for-mo-1.html "Month 3":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/12/improving-perl-5-grant-report.html "Month 4":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/01/improving-perl-5-grant-report-1.html "Month 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/02/improving-perl-5-grant-report-2.html Before

I am pleased to announce that Ricardo Signes's grant application for "travel to the QA Hackathon":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/01/perl-5-grant-application-trave.html has been accepted. If you would like to help fund grants like this or any of our other projects please visit our "donation system":https://secure.donor.com/pf012/give. If you would like to contribute directly to the "2012 Perl QA Hackathon":http://2012.qa-hackathon.org/qa2012/ they are accepting "donations":http://2012.qa-hackathon.org/qa2012/donate.html.

Nicholas Clark writes: I finally got time to address the weak reference global destruction "panic" described in November's report. Now understanding the problem, the interim fix seemed clean and fast to implement. Of course no plan survives contact with the enemy. In this case, fixing the first panic revealed a second panic at a different point in the code. In turn, that took a lot of time to nail down

We have received the following Perl 5 grant application from Ricardo Signes. Before the Board votes on this proposal we would like to have a period of community consultation. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org. Name Ricardo Signes Project Title Perl QA Hackathon 2012 Amount Requested: $900 Synopsis This grant will be used to pay for travel

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the December period. Spent it continuing my overhaul of the re_eval mechanism. This month I finished off fixing literal code blocks within patterns; that is to say, in all places where a code block appears literally within a quoted-regex context in perl source, that code block will only be compiled once, at the same time as the

Nicholas Clark writes: The start of December was mostly spent unpicking and simplifying how embed.h is included in perl.h. embed.h is one of the core's generated headers, containing C pre-processor directives to simplify use of the C API functions, by wrapping them such that the programmer doesn't need to deal with the implementation details of ithreads. Over the years, embed.h has come to be included by perl.h in 4 different

chromatic writes: Last year Perl.com came back to life, this time under the guidance of The Perl Foundation. We're glad to be back, publishing tips, tricks, and tutorials for novices, dabblers, and professionals alike! We've already published some great articles, but we need your help. What cool things are you doing with Perl in your work? What clever hacks have you perpetuated as you play? Which module did you just

Nicholas Clark writes: A fair chunk of November was spent on disentangling pod/buildtoc Originally pod/buildtoc was a script run by the pumpking to rebuild pod/buildtoc.pod, and pod/buildtoc.pod was shipped in the distribution. In 2003 I extended it to add code to regenerate the lists of Pod files in various Makefiles, which were repetitive to maintain manually, and contained several errors where particular files were omitted. The assumption was that pod/buildtoc

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the November period. Spent it continuing my overhaul of the re_eval mechanism. This month I made literal code blocks work properly within runtime patterns, i.e. /$runtime I also made it so that qr//'s embedded within other patterns are no longer simply stringified and interpolated into the new pattern; instead, any code blocks within the qr are

I am happy to announce that Dr. Nicholas Clark's request for an extension of his "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Grant":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund, "Improving Perl 5":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/08/grant-proposal-improving-perl.html, has been accepted. This extension will allow Nicholas to spend another 400 hours working on the Perl 5 core. Since the "Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund":http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl_5_core_maintenance_fund was created in June we have raised a total of $58,856. I would like to thank everyone who has supported this

We have received the following "Hague Grant":http://www.perlfoundation.org/ian_hague_perl_6_development_grants application from Jonathan "Duke" Leto. Before we vote on this proposal we would like to have a period of community consultation for 10 days. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments to karen at perlfoundation.org. Name Jonathan "Duke" Leto Project Title PL/Perl6 Infrastructure and Improvements Synopsis The proposed grant would support the development of PL/Perl6,

Nicholas Clark has requested an extension of $20,000 for his "Improving Perl 5 grant":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/08/grant-proposal-improving-perl.html. The grant, that is currently running, is on track to finish successfully at the end of November. Before we make a decision on this extension we would like to have a period of community consultation, which will last for seven days. Please leave feedback in the comments or if you prefer send email with your comments

I am pleased to announce that Carl Mäsak's Hague Grant application, "Implementation of macros in Rakudo":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/09/hague-grant-application-implem.html, has been accepted. I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on this proposal. If you would like to help fund grants like this or any of our other projects please visit our "donation system":https://secure.donor.com/pf012/give.

Nicholas Clark writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the October period. automating git bisect: I continued the work I started at the end of September to automate the use of git bisect. My hope is that it's now easy enough for anyone who finds a core perl behaviour change that affects them to use it to find the commit that caused it and the associated

Dave Mitchell writes: As per my grant conditions, here is a report for the October period. Spent it mainly working on fixing literal code within runtime and qr//, e.g. /$runtime Over the last month I have averaged 15.4 hours per week. As of 2011/10/31: since the beginning of the grant: 86.4 weeks 957.8 total hours 11.1 average hours per week Since the recent extending of the