perl's state in mandriva cooker

some time after mandriva 2010.1 has been released, i'm now pleased to report that perl has been updated to 5.12.1, all cpan modules are up-to-date (including padre 0.68) or bugs have been reported upstream... and parrot 2.6.0 is currently building.

the perl 5.12.0 - 5.12.1 upgrade was really smooth: no patch to rediff, reapply, etc. that's definitely a good thing for perl maintainers to have a stable series with only critical fixes going in. i've already said it, but thanks again to p5p!

perl status for mandriva 2010.1 (version freeze)

it's that time of the year: next mandriva version is due beginning of june, which means all updates are on hold - unless they solve a bug or any other problem worth fixing.

on the perl front, mandriva 2010.1 will therefore ship:

• perl 5.10.1 (5.12.x has been postponed to 2011.0)
• padre 0.60
  
• parrot 2.3.0 and rakudo 2010.03
• ... and 1912 dists from cpan!
  

as always, if you miss a perl module, just drop a note (in the comments, or a mail, or on mandriva bugzilla) and i'll package it for you.

retrospective 2009

2009's over, but the year was quite a busy one for me on the perl front:

• i finally took the time to investigate moose, and decided to port some of my code to use it.
• i discovered dist::zilla, and definitely plan to use it in all my dists.
• i discovered some other cool new perl modules (thanks guys).
  
• i uploaded some new dists on cpan, including games::pandemic (which i'm quite proud of, even if i need to continue hacking on it).
• i updated & released some of my existing dists.
  
• i contributed to other projects such as padre, dist-zilla, etc. sending patches is a good way to thank the author for their work.
• it's even easier to contribute with github, which i'm using more and more for my projects (and it's no more slow by now, woohoo!). of course, git is the master piece allowing this easy sharing.
  
• on mandriva's front, i resurrected parrot rpm, and finally shipped rakudo.
  
• 2009 was also the year of the great migration to %perl_convert_version
• ... with lots of new perl modules available as rpm (i am managing 450 of them).
  
• ... and finally i took ownership of perl rpm. (thank you perl5 porters btw for 5.10.1 and the push for next stable version!)

so, busy indeed 2009 was... i just hope that 2010 will be as fruitful on the perl front for me, and for the perl ecosystem by large.

parrot 1.9.0 available in mandriva

since parrot 1.9.0 is officially out, it landed quite quickly in mandriva cooker. next rakudo version will soon follow.

rakudo available in mandriva

after some chat with parrot-porters, i finally undertood that what's get installed in /usr/src/parrot (and that i was trimming during installation) is not parrot full source, but intermediate forms of pmc, needed if high-level languages want to subclass them. they are thus now shipped in parrot-src package - and this is enough for rakudo to be compiled.

therefore, rakudo 2009-11 is now (finally) available in mandriva...

the state of perl in mandriva 2010

mandriva linux 2010 is out... this is thus a good time to have a look at the state of perl in this release.

adelie (mdv 2010 codename) ships perl 5.10.1 with threads^[0], which allowed me to drop half the patches carried within mandriva^[1]. and since perl 5 porters hope to make perl 5 releases more often, it means that (hopefully) i'll be able to trim down those patches even more!

on the modules front, mandriva is shipping plenty of them. padre 0.47 (and lots of plugins), moose, poe framework (and lots of components), devel modules, dbi drivers, gui (tk, wx, gtk) and various lib bindings, you name it... using book's pearl of wisdom, this gives us^[2]:

12117 installed modules
including 11016 from cpan (15.65% of cpan)
that is 1685 distributions (8.88% of cpan)

that's not half of cpan, but a good deal nevertheless. chances are that you will find the module you need - and if you don't, drop me a mail or open a request and i'll package it for you.

but the biggest change that you will see in mandriva 2010 regarding perl (well, maybe you won't even notice it), is the new standardized version scheme forced upon all perl modules. for example, dist-zilla version 1.092680 is shipped for mandriva 2010 in rpm perl-Dist-Zilla-1.92.680. yes, i know, it means that the mandriva version might differ from upstream version. yes, i am aware that this sucks. yes, i am also aware that there's no real way to get upstream version back from mandriva rpm version. and no, i don't plan to roll back this change - unless you have another miracle solution that deals with rpm not understanding cpan modules changing their versioning scheme without bumping their major (grrr!).

however, note that previous mandriva version (and fedora too) already mangled some modules version, but not all of them - which is even worse imo. since i agree with david that version numbers should be boring, all modules now have their version mangled. no ifs, no buts, we're mangling it. and it makes life easier for us packagers...

of course, the modules' code is not affected by this change. it's only the packaging that changed a bit. to check which version is installed, just check the $VERSION of this package. that's always been, and remains, the only safe way to be sure. eg:

$ perl -E 'for (@ARGV){eval "require $_"; say "$_\t",$_->VERSION if !$@}' Dist::Zilla
Dist::Zilla     1.092680

on the parrot front, we're shipping 1.6.0 (1.7.0 was too late to be included). and rakudo is still not present, since it cannot use an installed parrot.

all in all, that's a quite a good release on the perl front. if you add all the work that went in all other areas, mandriva 2010 will be quite a solid release. i invite you to test it out - who knows, you might even like it so much that you'll switch to it permanently! :-)

[0] no need to complain, rgs - i know your feelings about it.
[1] yup, i took the ownership of the perl package - silly me...
[2] why, yes, i install all perl modules available as rpm on my box :-)

perl 5.10.1 has hit cooker

perl 5.10.1 is out, so i just built it for mandriva cooker - after fighting the build system which seems to be broken very often those days. :-(

it's currently propagating on mirrors, and should hit your machines soon... lots of other packages will need to be rebuilt, so you may want to run urpmi with the --keep flag.

in other news, parrot 1.5.0 is also available on cooker since yesterday.

parrot 1.4.0 landed on mandriva

latest stable parrot version (1.4.0) is now available on mandriva - enjoy.

which parrot version to package?

after some lengthy discussions finding the final versioning scheme for parrot, allison finally decided that parrot will use the following version numbers:

• 1.0 (March, deprecation point)
• 1.1 (April)
• 1.2 (May)
• 1.3 (June)
• 1.4 (July, deprecation point)
• 1.5 (August)
• 1.6 (September)
• 1.7 (October)
• 1.8 (November)
• 1.9 (December)
• 2.0 (January, deprecation point)
• 2.1 (February)
• 2.2 (March)
• 2.3 (April)
• 2.4 (May)
• 2.5 (June)
• 2.6 (July, deprecation point)
• 2.7 (August)
• 2.8 (September)
• 2.9 (October)
• 2.10 (November)
• 2.11 (December)
• 3.0 (January, deprecation point)

the stable versions will be the deprecation points - that is, 1.0.0, 1.4.0, 2.0.0, 2.6.0 and 3.0.0. this means that those versions may have some bugfix releases during their support lifetime (1 year), but only for very limited stuff (security or other critical problems). everything is described in parrot's support policy.

as parrot packager for mandriva, this is good to know. however, i don't really know what to do: should i package the stable versions? or should i update the package for each new devel version?

since parrot is quite in flux those times, version 1.0.0 (which is 3 monthes old) is really useless... if you add that almost nothing production-ready relies on it currently, i have decided to update the package on a monthly basis. which means that rpm for parrot 1.3.0 is available on cooker right now.

but let's think forward a bit... when rakudo will be able to use an existing parrot, when perl 6 will be in production, i won't continue like that: i'll just stick (of course) with the production releases... but when will this point happen? when will i switch from devel to stable versions? this remains to be seen...

parrot revived on mandriva

i just took ownership of parrot rpm on mandriva. it was indeed left over for a long time, since only version 0.4.17 was available! after some time fighting with it, i'm happy to report that mandriva cooker (the development version of mandriva) now features latest and greatest parrot 0.9.1. enjoy...

befunge on parrot fix for "sgml spaces" error in mycology

my bad - mycology was right, i was wrong. when spotting an error in my befunge interpreters, i should trust matti and look in my code. :-)

the sgml spaces mycology error mentioned previously came from the instruction ` which is greater than, not greater than or equal.

so i fixed it, and befunge on parrot now passes completely the befunge 93 mycology tests.

befunge on parrot interpreter now working (again)

it all started with a discussion on #parrot:

Dec 28 19:17:27 <kj> don't think zcode is still being maintained
Dec 28 19:19:16 <rurban> Looks like so, yes.
Dec 28 19:19:27 <rurban> befunge being the worst.

(funny thing is that i wasn't even here at that time, cognominal reported it to me later on)

as befunge on parrot author, it hurted my pride. i could stand that befunge wasn't the best parrot language implemented, but being the worst... i had to do something!

so, after some time to compile parrot (didn't did that for 3 years, it's now way easier!), getting up to speed to groak parrot error messages, i started porting befunge on recent parrot.

i took the opportunity to move from pasm to pir, using neat addons such as subs (even with parameters and return values!), named vars, random pmc (instead of pseudo random stuff using mod and chicken sacrifying) and other welcome stuff that were not available in 2002 when i first implemented befunge on parrot.

the result is a working befunge-93 implementation on top of parrot, and befunge now passes its tests:

$ make test
../../parrot -o befunge.pbc befunge.pir
cd .. && /usr/bin/perl5.10.0 t/harness --languages=befunge
befunge/t/basic....ok
All tests successful.
Files=1, Tests=1, 1 wallclock secs ( 0.06 cusr + 0.01 csys = 0.07 CPU)

i also checked this implementation with mycology, and it seems to work:

• plain mycology: reports a failure on sgml-mode, but that's a bug in mycology
  
• mycouser: success, before jumping to befunge-98 library semantics, where it fails (of course)
  
• mycorand: success
  

so, all in all, befunge on parrot is once again alive and kicking!