My last post showed historical Perl 5 release cycles, but comments I got on and off the blog suggested that my vaguely positive sentiments about the official support policy were misunderstood. This post expands and clarifies my view. I have redone my Perl 5 release cycle graph again with a few changes. First, for the [...]
Beginning with Perl 5, version 12, the Perl 5 language began an annual release cycle, with a new stable release around May of each year. Beginning with version 14, the Perl 5 maintainers also announced a formal support policy and ended support for version 10. This is a significant change from the history of Perl, [...]
Several recent posts (more here and here) discuss whether Perl 6 is an impediment for progress of Perl 5 and debate remedies involving changing the name of one or the other. The problem I have with these debates is that they sideline the realities of the current situation in favor of romanticizing a counterfactual. The [...]
I've written about my efforts to get CPAN.pm to bootstrap local::lib and about a new HTTP client for CPAN.pm. I'm pleased to say that both have been merged into the development branch of the Perl core. Barring any show-stopping bugs, the forthcoming Perl 5.13.9 will let a non-privileged user bootstrap access to CPAN, even if [...]
Last night I was inspired to patch the Perl core to load IO::File on demand when calling a method on a file handle would otherwise die. This effectively makes file handles actual "lazy" IO::File objects. If you want to use file handles procedurally, you never need IO::File. But if you try to treat handles as [...]
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