a progressbar for curses-toolkit

curses::toolkit is the promising toolkit for writing curses applications with perl. it follows a gtk-like api, and supports theming. it is using poe for its event loop (although one can craft its own loop), and currently begins a loose moose conversion.

however, the set of widgets is currently a bit restricted: hbox, vbox, buttons, label, entries, windows... so, i wrote yesterday a progressbar widget. it's a bit difficult to understand at a glance where to put code, but i finally nailed a rough first version - it needs to be polished, though. once a listbox widget will be available, the toolkit will be sufficient for a lot of tasks.

lots of stuff remains to be done of course: moose-ification to get rid of its hand-crafted roles, building a real test suite (how the heck are we supposed to test a curses toolkit?), completing the widget set... volunteers welcome.

ironman challenge status?

ironman blogging challenge is now running since quite some time, but it seems that there's no followup. personal status is not updated since october 3rd, so i guess having some stats on the number of bloggers managing to keep up with the pace is not available either...

too bad, since mst managed to gather the perl community to make some noise on the web. maybe an update could promote a second life to perl blogging?

how to profile a perl program?

so, it seems that google isn't aware about perl profiling best practices... this blog post will thus try to link a lot of times to devel-nytprof, which is the solution to use to profile a perl program.

for profiling perl, just use devel::nytprof. it's an easy to use perl profiler:

$ perl -d:NYTProf my_prog.pl
[... let it run, it will be slower than your usual run ...]
$ nytprofhtml

when this is done, just point your brower to the locally created ./nytprof/index.html and enjoy the nice reports.

this is the best profiler for perl available currently. in case you missed the point: the perl profiler devel-nytprof is great, use it for your perl profiling needs.

which module to extract perl prereqs?

in dzil plugin autoprereq, i'm extracting prereqs from the dist modules. i want this extract to be fast, based on the actual code (not makefile.pl or meta.yml, since the goal is to generate them), and as accurate as possible. it should also find base classes, moose roles and other "hidden" dependencies. finally, it should extract the minimum version needed for a given module, including minimum perl version.

my first version was regex-based. i can already see your horrified face - but really it wasn't so bad, since it only needed to find some specific statements such as uses and requires. current version is using ppi, which is better suited for corner cases.

however, long-term makes me think that it would be better to rely on an external module. so, what are the alternatives out there on cpan, and can i use them in autoprereq?

• b::perlreq - parses the file, but reports file (File/Basename.pm) instead of modules, and is generally more suited for rpm
  
• module::extract::use - using ppi to parse a file, but extracts only use & require statements (no inheritance, moose roles, etc). also, it reports no minimum version extraction, only a list of modules.
  
• test::dependencies - using either b::perlreq (see above) or a regex scheme underneath
  
• module::scandeps - runs the file (which is slow), and finds all modules included - and sometimes a bit more (eg: file::homeDir::darwin is found for a module using file::homedir, even on a unix platform). can also run as a static analyser, but calls cpanplus (?!) which is slow.
  
• module::info - regex based
  
• module::cpants::generator::prereq - parses makefile.pl, where i want sthg that parses actual code
  
• module::cpants::kwalitee::prereq - parse meta.yml, makefile.pl or build.pl

so, no module was doing exactly what i wanted... since i am using ppi and that module::extract::use does the same, i contacted brian d foy to see whether he would be interested in additional extractions (moose roles, base classes, etc.) for this module. he was, so those enhancements are now pushed on my github clone.

i'm now waiting for a new release of this module with my enhancements, meaning that i can get rid of this part of the code in dzil autoprereq. which was, if you recall, the original goal! :-)