Saturday, June 30, 2007

Fedora miscellany

While looking through the big mess of pending reviews, I decided I really should try to do at least a couple of merge reviews. Those two were enough of a pain that I've decided not to do any more today. :-) I'll try to squeeze in one or two a day for a while though. It's the least I can do, especially since I've historically been really bad about doing package reviews...

I also talked to bpepple a bit about doing a semi-official Fedora event at the Ohio LinuxFest in September. Let's hope something comes of that...

Perl 6 update

I've been working for around a year now on packaging everything Perl 6-related for Fedora. For a while now, everyone has been able to install perl-Perl6-Bible to get the available Perl 6 documentation. I also have been working on packages for Parrot and Pugs. Those packages aren't quite done, but I've submitted them for review so everyone knows I'm working on them.

Friday, June 29, 2007

cpanspec 1.71

I just released cpanspec 1.71. The new version handles bzip2-compressed tar archives, filters out a few more obviously bogus files from %doc, and adds some options to cpanget. From the changelog:
* Add option processing to cpanget.  It now accepts the following options:

-h Print usage message
-n Don't download, only print URLs
-q Work quietly

The other day I had a reason (and honestly I don't remember what it was :-) to get the URL for something on CPAN, and, since the code was there in cpanget anyway... Now you can do this:
$ cpanget -q -n String::Random
String::Random: http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/S/ST/STEVE/String-Random-0.22.tar.gz

For the next version, I want to do the right thing with the new split perl package in F7 and later. I posted a note to fedora-perl-devel-list to get some opinions on how best to handle that.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Catching up...

Thanks to back-to-back bouts of cold/flu that left me unable to sleep (which left me a zombie when I was awake) a few months ago, I got really behind on Fedora work. Then we found a new location for the store, so I got sucked in to the insane amount of planning that requires. With all that, my contributions to Fedora have suffered to the point that a couple of my packages don't even run on the recently-released Fedora 7.

Slowly but surely I'm catching up though. I have an update to amavisd-new in updates-testing now. I've updated all my Perl module packages in the development tree. I've closed out or commented on several pending package reviews. I've touched base with the SoC project I'm mentoring.

Next, the bugzilla queue...

Is this thing on?

I'm normally violently opposed to using hosted services for things. When I decided to set up a blog for updates on the million-and-one projects I'm working on, I looked around for a good Perl-based solution for blogging. (Why Perl? I'm good enough with Perl that I feel completely comfortable that there won't be a problem I can't at least understand, if not fix, with Perl-based projects. I can't say the same for other languages.)

After looking around and asking my local Perl Mongers group, I came to the conclusion that blogging is one of those things that Perl works great for, and in fact it is so easy to set up a blog with Perl that the standard suggestion is to just roll your own. There are dozens of ad-hoc blog implementations, but no clear leader that does everything the average user would expect from a blog, maybe because blogging is such a personal thing that rolling your own is appealing. Or maybe because the various solutions that are currently available are just good enough that people consider this a solved problem. Or maybe everybody else gave up and started using hosted services too.

So, since I don't have the time to roll my own right now, and the idea of running the solutions that are out there right now on my own servers scares me a little (small open-source projects don't necessarily have enough eyes on them to make me feel comfortable that they are secure), I'm setting aside my own bias against hosted services to try this thing out for a while.