mst lost his ironman status

as said on his blog, mst lost the ironman competition. i wonder how many of the early joiners still retained their ironman status. i still should be in the competition (although really hard at some times), even if there's no way to tell since the ironman app isn't updated since quite some time.

anyway, i get to cast my vote. i don't really care the hair colour, but the talk bit is more interesting. before you guys start submitting ideas such as why php/ruby/python is far better than perl, remember that:

1. mst started the challenge to help perl get known. finishing by forcing him to praise another language seems to be against the rules. not even speaking of this not being very classy...
   
2. the talk will be heavily advertised (at least in the perl community). are you sure you want to offer such a gallery for another language?
   

so i'll cast my vote on a what i will do to advertise perl even more this year talk - hoping this will motivate mst to start another initiative to help promote perl^[0]. i'm open to any other talk subject in the same vein. and i'm ready to trade my colour voting^[1] for you to vote for such a topic. :-)

so here's my vote, mst!
in the meantime, this does not preclude you to continue blogging...

[0] of course, mst can game the talk by showing a single slide with "nothing" on it, but, that, again, would not be very classy. and mst would not settle on such an easy end, would he?
[1] for the pink or orange fans around there

games::risk speaks your language!

well, maybe not yet, but very soon - as soon as you'll contribute the translated strings! :-)

those days, i feel like working on prisk, the risk clone that i wrote in perl. i added full internationalization, and contributed the first foreign language (french, as you may have guessed :-) ).

you can contribute translations for your language by forking the project, and then sending a pull request with your changes. it should be quite fast, since it only features 73 strings to translate. you know what to do... :-)

note that i also fixed a crash that was appearing sometimes during game startup. i'll now try to find some time to work on bigger topics, such as sanitizing the whole codebase, or adding features...

is cpants down?

since some time, i did not manage to reach cpants... i don't seem to be the only one, so does anyone know what's going on?

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.

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...