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

It is that time of the year, again, and here follows the usual message. I am sorry for not being more creative The Perl Foundation is looking at giving some grants ranging from $500 to $2000 in May 2012. You don't have to have a large, complex, or lengthy project. You don't even have to be a Perl master or guru. If you have a good idea and the means

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

Joel Berger wrote: Once again I would like the thank the Perl Foundation for supporting me in my effort to provide a mechanism to ease the creation of Alien:: modules. Further I'd like to thank the many Perlers who have commented in various places that this project is of interest and that they are looking forward to providing that Alien:: module that they have always meant to write. This is

David Golden reported: I have adapted the "proof of concept" code that I demonstrated at Perl Oasis based on issues discovered subsequently. The code is sufficient to deploy the "Hello World" application that will be the basis for one of the tutorials and the presentation. Over the next couple weeks, I will be working on documentation and preparing the "cookbooks" for release to Opscode's community Chef repository. I will also

In order to satisfy requirements involving the use of the word "Foundation" in our business name, the board of directors have voted to amend the articles of incorporation for The Perl Foundation with an updated set of purposes for the organization. The new purposes for which the corporation is organized are: cultivating a collaborative open source community and an ecosystem of computer language implementations collectively known as "Perl" and complementary

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

After reading the community comments about the four grant proposals, and after the grant committee vote on the proposals, the results are: The grant proposal EPublisher Website, was voted for rejection. The grants Alien::Base Base classes for Alien:: modules and Cooking Perl with Chef were voted to be funded. Given to budget restrictions the grant proposal Easy installation of non-CPAN dependencies will not be founded on this round, but will

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

The Perl Foundation Grants Committee is proud to present four grant proposals for community discussion. As in previous rounds, please comment and clarify any issue about the grant in each grant post and not in this post. The submitted grants are: "Alien::Base Base classes for Alien:: modules":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/02/2012q1-grant-proposal-alienbas.html by Joel Berger "EPublisher Website":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/02/2012q1-grant-proposal-epublish.html by Boris Däppen "Easy installation of non-CPAN dependencies":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/02/2012q1-grant-proposal-easy-ins.html by Alexandr Ciornii "Cooking Perl with Chef":http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/02/2012q1-grant-proposal-cooking.html by David Golden

Cooking Perl with Chef Name: David Golden Email: Amount Requested: USD $2000 Synopsis I propose to create ready-to-use tools and supporting tutorials that teach Perl developers how to deploy Perl applications repeatable and reliably using the Chef configuration management tool. Benefits to the Perl Community First-class support for Perl in Chef, just like other web development languages Open cookbooks and tutorials to encourage sharing techniques and practices for app deployment

Name: Joel Berger Email: Amount Requested: $500 Synopsis Artur Bergman's documentation for the Alien namespace specifically says that there is no framework for Alien:: modules, however, in writing the Alien::GSL manpage I find that most of the code I am writing has nothing to do with the GSL library and could as easily apply to many external libraries. I intend for Alien::Base to comprise some base classes for other Alien::

Boris Däppen Email: Amount Requested: 800$ Synopsis Develop and deploy a website which offers the service of rendering different content into eBooks. There will be several input and output formats supported by the website. An explicit input option will be CPAN documentation. POD in general will be an input option. Output options will be eBook formats. The open EPUB but also Amazons MOBI format will be implemented. The framework used

Name: Alexandr Ciornii Email: Amount Requested: $2000 Synopsis Many CPAN modules depend on non-CPAN libraries Installation of such module requires that library be installed before installing CPAN module. For beginners it is more confusing as library may be installed, but its headers may not. I'd like to automate this step and install corresponding Linux package as part of module install. Currently main module of this project has codename CPAN::non, it

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