The Perl Journal May, 2004
As expected, Perl 5.8.4 followed closely on the heels of RC2. The suidperl issues that caused problems in RC1 were solved by removing the setuidperl executable; instead "to preserve backwards compatibility with scripts that invoke #!/usr/bin/suidperl the only set uid binary is now sperl5.8.n (sperl5.8.4 for this release). suidperl is installed as a hard link to Perl; both suidperl and Perl will invoke sperl5.8.4 automatically as the set uid binary, so this change should be completely transparent," explained the release documentation.
The schedule has been posted for YAPC North America, which will take place in Buffalo, New York, June 16-18. The three-day conference will feature Allison Randal delivering the keynote address; Damian Conway speaking on Perl 6 and "a series of useful modules whose interface is...nothing;" Mark Fowler explaining how to prepare a CPAN distribution; as well as many other well-known speakers covering topics that range from career planning to writing Perl without a text editor. (See http://yapc.org/ America/talk_desc.shtml for the full list of talks.) Evening events will include an IMAX showing of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, sponsored by O'Reilly, and a tour of the University of Buffalo's Center for Computational Research. Proposals for lightning talks at YAPC::NA are still being accepted; you can submit ideas at http://justanotherperlhacker.org/cgi-local/ lightning/submit.pl?conference=yapcna2004 until June 8.
Things just got easier for Perl hackers in the Big Easy: NewOrleans.pm has been officially launched, with a wiki at http:// neworleans.pm.org/ and a mailing list archived at http://mail.pm .org/mailman/listinfo/neworleans-pm. The first meeting was held May 14 at the Fair Grinds Coffeehouse, and subsequent meetings are scheduled for the second Friday of each month. The group is already making plans to tackle new Perl projects such as "a clean, easy-to-use, object-oriented CPAN package that would allow for the merging of record data into a printable output," or "a module that makes it easy to build interpretors for XML-based languages."
The Italian Perl Mongers have finished a labor of love: They've translated the entire Perl functions documentation (perlfunc.pod) into Italian. It's all available now at http://www.perl.it/documenti/ perlfunc/index.html, along with an Italian translation of the Perl FAQ documents (perlfaq*.pod). The group plans to post a POD2::IT module to CPAN that will contain the translated documentation. Their work is part of the Italian Perldoc Translation Project, hosted on SourceForge at http://pod2it.sourceforge.net/.
Vishal Vatsa, a graduate student at the National University of Ireland, has undertaken porting GCC to the Parrot architecture as his Master's research project. While the project is still in its opening stages—"I have managed to create a token backend for Parrot so far, nothing really great (i.e. does not work at the moment)," Vatsa posted on the perl6-internals list—a successful implementation would allow Java code to compile to Parrot bytecode. Vatsa tracks his progress at http://www.parrot.cs.may.ie/.
For others looking to help out with Parrot and Perl 6, chromatic on the perl6-language list suggested resurrecting the P6 Stories project. Initially conceived as a month-long experiment "to see how far we could get in describing the current implementation requirements for Perl 6 in terms of XP-style story cards," the wiki has been languishing recently. It awaits new contributors at http://p6stories.kwiki.org/.
Meanwhile, Dan Sugalski threw down a challenge for all the Forth lovers out there: "Your task, if you choose to accept it, is to turn languages/forth/forth.pasm into a loadable compiler module that you can compile workable Forth code with. (Adding new base words are optional, though that certainly won't hurt). There's some stub code in there as it is to wrap a sub pmc around a Forth word, but being stub it doesn't actually work. This'd be a good opportunity to fix that."
Bricolage, the open-source content-management system written in Perl using HTML::Mason and Apache/mod_perl, is now in version 1.8.0. This release has been a year in coming and represents the work of 20 independent developers as well as contributions from various companies worldwide. New features cited in the release announcement include "performance boosts to search queries and URI uniqueness validation; e-mail distribution; a greatly simplified templating API; template sandboxes to enable template development without interfering with production templates; support for Template Toolkit templates (http://www.template-toolkit.org/); new "Publish" and "Recall" permissions for improved workflow management; per-user preferences; document formatting at publish time, rather than publish scheduling time; new German and Mandarin localizations; image thumbnails and icons for all media documents; and support for HTMLArea WYSIWYG editing (http://www.interactivetools.com/products/htmlarea/)." The Bricolage home page is http://www.bricolage.cc/.