Success!

$ rpm -q rakudo parrot
rakudo-0.6.3-1.fc9.x86_64
parrot-0.6.3-1.fc9.x86_64
$ perl6 -e '"Hello".say;'
Hello
$ perl6 -v
This is Rakudo Perl 6, revision 0 built on parrot 0.6.3
for x86_64-linux-thread-multi.

Copyright 2006-2008, The Perl Foundation.



YAPC::NA 2008 round-up

On the first day of YAPC, I gave a talk titled Perl on Fedora.



(Google Docs lost a little formatting in translation, but I've cleaned that up, and I think the results look substantially better than what I actually presented.)

It was the first talk I've given at a conference. I thought it went reasonably well, but I've made a mental note to prepare much further in advance next time, and to learn how to make a presentation that doesn't look lame. (I think I may have a tiny bit of PowerPoint envy.)

On the second day, David Wheeler took some time to talk with me about the Bricolage package I've been working on. It turns out it might actually work as-is, at least for PostgreSQL. I have some work to do to make it work for other databases.

On the third day, I finally got some time to work on my Parrot package. I got it to build with the latest version of Parrot, then broke it to add sub-packages for all the various languages I could figure out how to build. Hopefully Real Soon Now I'll have a rakudo (Perl 6) package, plus packages for a bunch of other random languages like bf.

Still in love...

As I mentioned before, I'm really liking the ThinkPad X300. My only real gripe at the time was the lack of battery life. Well, last week I got the 3-cell "Option Bay" battery (which replaces the optical drive), and today I finally got the 6-cell replacement "main" battery.

As I'm typing this, powertop says I have 5.8 hours remaining, and I've been running for 24 minutes. So not exactly the 10 hours advertised on Lenovo's site, but, hey, definitely not bad.

I'm taking this thing to YAPC next week, so after living with it for a week, I should be able to do a full review.

Oh, and according to the shipping scale at the shop, with all 9 cells worth of battery, the X300's total weight is up to 3.5 pounds.

Packaging Bricolage

I've been very occasionally working the last several years on packaging Bricolage, a CMS written in Perl (and implemented using Mason). Unfortunately, until very recently, Bricolage would only work on Apache 1 (and mod_perl 1). That has (finally) changed with the recent release of Bricolage 1.11.0.

Recently, I've been putting in a lot of time just trying to build a package, and I finally have something that will build and install (source rpm). I don't pretend even for a moment that it will work, but at least it's a start. (It also doesn't make rpmlint at all happy, but I'll get to that...)

At this point, I could really use some help getting the package to work, testing it, etc., so it can be submitted for review.

I'm in love.

My ThinkPad X300 showed up unexpectedly a couple of days ago. (There's a shortage of the things, so even though I ordered it a few weeks ago, I still wasn't expecting it for a couple of weeks. Luckily, since we're a reseller, our Lenovo sales rep expedited the order a little bit.) I need to use it a little more before I do a complete review, but I wanted to share my first impressions while I can still remember them.

First of all, it just seems bigger in real life than it does in pictures. It's definitely much lighter than the average laptop. (I'll be curious to see how much the 6-cell battery and the "Option Bay" battery, which replaces the optical drive, change the feel of the thing. We forgot the Option Bay battery on the actual laptop order, so we ordered it separately later. Neither of the bigger batteries have shown up yet.)

The weird part is that it feels totally normal. Everything is proportioned like a bigger laptop, so unless you set it next to a full-sized laptop, it just feels natural. Plus you get a full-sized keyboard, which anyone used to a ThinkPad should appreciate. (I have to note that this is my first ThinkPad, so I'm hoping the escape key won't bug me too much.)

So far my only complaint is that I don't seem to be getting anywhere near the advertised battery life, but there could be a lot of reasons for that, and I haven't really looked very closely at the problem yet. (For all I know, it could be some side-effect of something on Fedora 9.) (Update: It turns out I'm still waiting for the 6-cell battery to ship, so I've just been using the 3-cell. The 2-2.5 hours I'm seeing are still around half what is advertised though...)

Speaking of Fedora 9, I did my first fresh install of F9 on the X300. I have some first impressions of it to share as well, but I think I'll do that in a separate post...

In the mean time, I think I need to go shopping for a new laptop bag/case/backpack/whatever. I'd love some suggestions from X300 owners...

imapsync

I'm working on a job today where we might need to use imapsync. I didn't see it in Fedora (or in the package review queue), so I whipped up a package for it (unpacked). I doubt I'll have time to submit it soon, so if anyone wants to run with it, you have my blessing. (Cc me on the bugzilla request so I'm aware of it though, please.)

There are some UTF-8 warnings from rpmlint that need to be fixed. See the comments at the beginning of imapsync.spec.

YAPC::NA 2008 abstract

This talk will cover the current state of Perl development in Fedora (and, by extension, RHEL, CentOS, etc.). Topics will include the following:

• Status of Perl on Fedora
  
  • Perl SIG
  
  
  • Number of Perl modules available in Fedora and EPEL
  
  
  • What we have and what we're missing
  
  
  • Licensing


• Using Perl packages
  
  • Using virtual rpm dependencies
  
  
  • yum, repoquery, etc.


• Packaging Perl modules
  • Generating packages using cpanspec
  
  
  • Building packages with rpmbuild
  
  
  • Using mock
  
  
  • Checking for problems with rpmlint
  
  
  • Submitting packages for inclusion in Fedora