I found this article referenced in login 2020 winter issue. It's about the ten most popular programming languages to Learn in 2021. The article mentions also seven other languages to consider learning. Perl is among those seven.

As announced in this dev.to post there is planned to be a one-day online "miniconf" for Perl and Raku in November. It will be held via Zoom and Thibault Duponchelle has posted the call for papers.

The talks can be about toolchain, devops, cloud, sysadmin, core, design patterns, web or whatever linked to Perl or Raku.

The RFC process is starting at the Corinna github repo.

For those who haven't seen it, Damian Conway has offered his thoughts on Corinna.

Note: the RFC documents are not final. We pretty much have the minimum viable product (MVP) semantics nailed, but there are tricky issues regarding the grammar. Reading the issues in github will help if you're interested in helping.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/09/perl_cat_hiatus/ tells the tale. Again, I'm depressed.

Regards,

John Davies

Software downloaded 30,000 times from PyPI ransacked developers’ machines by Dan G, 20210730, via Ars Technica. Again.

Source post: JFrog Detects Malicious PyPI Packages Stealing Credit Cards and Injecting Code by Andrey P, Omer K, & Shachar M, 20210729.

Episodic Volunteering in Free/Libre/Open Source (FLOSS) Communities - a survey by kudra

TPF announcement

... research to understand episodic, or occasional, participation in the Perl and Raku communities... The results of the research will be provided as a TPF report and will assist the community in improving practices for managing episodic participation to provide insights into what FLOSS projects could do to become more sustainable.

I usually try to avoid clobbering the PM News section with release information about my modules. But i found a problem in my Net::Clacks::Server which can, under the wrong circumstances, either prevent startup or lead to all sorts of data corruption in cached data.

I have fixed this in Version 18 (at least i think it is completely fixed, bug reports are welcome).

Unfortunately, this upgrade features an incompatible change that clobbers the persistance file. There is a workaround for that to keep your cached data, though. From the UpgradeGuide.pod:

WARNING: BREAKING CHANGES regarding persistance files.

Version 18 provides better reliability for the Clacks Server when using a persistance file, including startup problems and prevention of data loss.

Here is the problem in older versions: If the server process is killed while writing the persistance file, the file on disk may be invalid (partial data) or completely blank. Blank files at least prevented the server from starting up, but otherwise incomplete files could lead to data corruption in cached data and/or all other sorts of problems. This relates to the fact that the server only does very minimal checks on its internal cache during runtime for performance reasons. The original persistance file was just a quick hack to dump/restore the cache between runs and did not account for system crashes or the process being killed while writing to disk.

This new version of Net::Clacks::Server tackles this in in a multi-stage approach:

1.) The persistance file now includes the ENDBYTE string as a third line. This is used to check if the file is complete.

2.) Before overwriting the current persistance file, it is COPIED to a file with '_bck' added to the configured name.

3.) The file is written under a new name (with '_' added at the end) and then MOVED over the correct file name. File move (rename) within the same directory should be an atomic operation of the operating system, so it either works or doesn't (no stopping half-way inbetween).

4.) An invalid persistance file doesn't prevent the clacks server startup. If it detects an invalid file, it first tries to load the previous version ('_bck'), then as a last desperate measure to prevent data loss, it tries to load the temporary file ('_'). If that also fails, it starts 'blankety-blank'.

Clacks caching was always designed as a CACHE, not as the final storage for important data. This upgrade to Version 18 changes the file format of the persistance file slighty. The older format is now detected as invalid, resulting in a "blankety-blank" startup. If you really want or need (?!?!?!) to preserve the cached data for some reason, there are two ways to accomplish this:

1.) Stop the clacks server and upgrade the Net::Clacks package. Edit the persistance file and add a third line with the word "ENDBYTES" without quotes as its only content.

or

2.) If you are running a master/slave setup with interclacks, you can stop ONLY the server that has the persistance file. Then upgrade Net::Clacks and start the server. It should start "blankety-blank" and automatically resyncronize cached data from the interclacks network. It works the same if all your clacks servers use persistance files for some weird reason, just restart them one-by-one, waiting inbetween for the interclacks sync to finish. You can use the example rawclient.pl. Connect to the server you keep running and start the MONITOR command. While interclacks sync is in progress, you will see KEYSYNC commands flying between the servers. If you stop seeing them for a few seconds, KEYSYNC is finished.

Just noticed a recent TPF Finding a shared vision of Perl post.

See also: Re: Perl questionaire by Gobby

today starts the The Perl and Raku Conference, Conference in the Cloud, at 11:30 New York time (16:30 GMT).

You can see how-to-attend-this-conference and the whole scheduling.

Profit it!

L*

A shared Vision of Perl

Hello!

Welcome to the survey on a shared vision of Perl!

Gobby is an innovative, Perl-based, survey tool. We're committed to the future of the Perl ecosystem and people that make up these communities.

We're looking for support in the development of Gobby as a Perl product. Please drop us a line to info@gobby.io if you like our approach to surveys and would like to be part of Gobby's future.

Best wishes,

Gary Beckwith
Founder of Gobby

other news (thuesday of past week) for the no|one|many perl community: the #perl irc channel moved from freenode to irc.libera.chat

> May we live in less interesting times

The above quote from (one of?) the announcement

Infact there was a massive migration from freenode to libera.

If you connect to the #perl old channel on freenode you will be automatically redirected to the ##perl channel not owned by previous people.

Relevant articles: freenode_staff_resigns and freenode_the_mainstream_irc_network_is_collapsing

There is also a youtube resume of the mass migration

L*

This year's StackOverflow Developers Survey is open at https://stackoverflow.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_7arimtzVFf8ipfM. Besides Perl the language there are a couple of opportunities to mention PerlMonks.

I've released version 1.34 of berrybrew.

Notable changes:

• UI elements now update on the fly, so all changes are reflected immediately
• You can 'use' any version of Perl you've got installed from the UI, which'll open a new CLI window set to the selected version
• You can now fetch the updated list of Strawberry Perls available through the UI
• Cloning installed Perls as well as a myriad of other operations can now be done through the UI
• The API has been updated so that internal objects are updated live-time. This makes having long-running processes possible
• Build/Test infrastructure updates
• Documentation updates
• Minor bug fixes

I've just got a new full time job, programming in Perl... finally, after several years of looking for that perfect work environment. Some of it will be on Windows (which I haven't used except for developing berrybrew), so I'm actually looking forward to using my own software, especially how useful its become thanks to the new UI I've developed.

Happy Perling!

-stevieb