roll your own dzil tutorial

rjbs created a roll-your-own dzil tutorial. this brings back memories, maybe there should be monsters in it. otoh, since it mentions module::install, maybe the monster quota is already met. :-)

anyway, the tutorial is a nice read for those wanting to learn dist-zilla. there are some glitches here and there (eg, it still mentions AllFiles plugin instead of GatherDir, and other v1 to v2 misses - i'll send patches), but is otherwise wicked cool.

and some of my plugins are even mentioned! :-)

no perl 5.12 in mandriva 2010.1

as announced previously, i did some further testing wrt perl 5.12.0 and mandriva. after having installed it, i've been able to use urpmi and compile various binary perl modules against 5.12.

however, decision has been taken not to push perl 5.12 in spring release. potential for havoc is too important - especially since it's used by many core tools. it'll have to wait after 2010.1 is out... but since all bits & pieces are ready to be pushed, it's now just a matter of time...

perl 5.12.0 in mandriva?

final perl 5.12.0 is now available. i updated our spec file in mandriva, and it builds ok both on my machine and mandriva's buildsystem - so i pushed it to main/testing. however, i did not manage to rebuild packages having a dep on perl, for an obscure reason having to do with testing media, bad karma or not enough chicken blood - i don't know exactly which reason is the good one.

i now need to have more thorough testing, in order to see if urpmi & other tools still works with new perl. i don't know if i'll have time before mandriva 2010.1 freeze date. not counting the fact that we'll have to create a c-wrapper to replace suidperl used in one of the draktools.

so, back to the question: perl 5.12.0 in mandriva? yep, "soon" - but maybe "soon" will mean "after 2010.1". note that if you can help testing, "soon" may revert to a true "soon" meaning...

github power

i started using github somewhere in 2009 iirc. i was a bit reluctant to use it back at that time, especially because of its speed (or lack of, actually)... and because i already hosted my projects of repo.or.cz.

however, i'm now really glad i started using it. speed is no longer a problem, and it provides really nice features. cia integration, network graphs, comments on commits, watching repos (even if i'm not totally happy with it right now), and of course... pull requests!

i was away this week-end, and found 4 pull requests in my mailbox for my modules when i came back. integrating other's work has never been easier with git and github which allows people to fork at will. that's the new way of writing code: create the basic stub of your module, and wait for others to enhance it! :-) git plugin for dist-zilla now supports pushing to a different branch, supports the new dist-zilla-tester framework and the bundle @git now accepts multi-valued args.

dvcs are a bit harder to grasp at first, but once you understand the concepts, they're really a killer application - especially when coupled with a cooperative platform such as github.