The Perl Journal October 2003
This month, Andy Lester fills us in on the plans for Phalanx, a test suite for Ponie. Do you have Perl news you'd like to share? Send it in to editors@tpj.com.
— Editors
Phalanx is a Perl QA project aimed at providing a solid testing base for Ponie, the next version of Perl 5 that will be based on the Parrot virtual machine. By increasing the test coverage of Perl modules and Perl itself, we will make Ponie the best-tested version of Perl ever.
The first phase of Phalanx will update the tests in 100 of the most widely used modules on CPAN. A Phalanx team member, or hoplite, will pick a distribution and, with the agreement and cooperation of the module's author, start working on the improvements. There may be one hoplite, or many, if the lead hoplite wants to bring others into that part of the project. Along the way, the hoplites will verify the accuracy of the documentation, explore the depth and breadth of the module, and make sure that everything that can be tested is tested. Once changes are made, the lead hoplite will feed patches back to the author, who will update the distribution. All changes are voluntary, and the author still retains full control of the module.
There are three goals for Phalanx. The first is to provide an excellent set of tests for the next version of Perl. Perhaps even more important, we want to encourage participation from members of the community who have never contributed back to Perl. It will be easy to get involved, and your involvement can be as much or as little as necessary. Prospective hoplites need not be part of perl5-porters or any perceived "Perl cabal," or even know about Perl internals. Finally, we're certain that we will uncover undiscovered bugs, and we'll identify them for the author, if not eliminate them.
After we've had some success in the first phase of Phalanx, we'll expand the process to Perl 5 itself and the core modules. Please visit the Phalanx web site at http://qa.perl.org/phalanx/. If you'd like to help out, join the perl-qa mailing list, or e-mail me at phalanx@petdance.com.
— Andy Lester
The 0.0.11 release of Parrot, dubbed "Doubloon," is now available from CPAN and http://dev.perl.org/cvs. The new version features a long list of enhancements, including executable output, dynamic PMC registration, a trial exception system, the beginnings of an object system, iterators; ordered hashes, and I/O system improvements. Steve Fink wrote on use.perl.org: "Start from parrotcode.org for information on all Parroty things. Our immediate future plans include exceptions and objects, so now's a good time to jump in if those things grab you."
— Shannon Cochran
As of press time, Perl 5.8.1 RC5 has been distributed, and the official 5.8.1 is expected within a few days, unless a nest of unexpected bugs is discovered burrowing within the release candidate. RC4 was tested for nearly two months, so the software would seem to be reasonably arthropod-proof. One update from the 5.8.0 release that may affect applications is the improved hash randomization. From the perldelta: "Previously, while the order of hash elements from keys(), values(), and each() was essentially random, it was still repeatable. Now, however, the order varies between different runs of Perl...For example, if you have used the Data::Dumper module to dump data into different files, and then compared the files to see whether the data has changed, now you will have false positives since the order in which hashes are dumped will vary."
Perl 5.8.1 RC5 is available at http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/J/JH/JHI/perl-5.8.1-RC5.tar.gz.
— Shannon Cochran
This year, under the auspices of YAPC::Europe, the London and Paris Perl Mongers held an auction to benefit The Perl Foundation; each agreed to rewrite the front page of their web site in the auction winner's language of choice. As it happened, however, neither the Anglophile nor Francophone contingents emerged victorious in the auction. Both were outbid by a group of Esperantists, who presumably saw in this bitter international rivalry a chance to promote the language of peace—and who, in the process, contributed 1300 Euros to the The Perl Foundation. Now both web sites must convert to Esperanto for a full month. Visitors to http://www.london.pm.org/ can already view the latest news of the "Londonaj Perl-Manipulistoj," but paris.mongueurs.net is asking for help in the translation project. To join the Esperanto effort, send e-mail with a blank subject line to majordomo@mongueurs.net, with "subscribe esperanto" in the body.
— Shannon Cochran