The Perl Foundation

I am delighted to announce that TPF has been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year's Google Summer of Code.

Google Summer of Code is a program that offers stipends to student developers for writing code for open source software projects. Last year we had nine projects accepted and we would love to have more this year.

Jonathan Leto is our chief organizer and he is looking for mentors and project ideas. The deadline for student applications is the 9th April and and if you are interested in working with us please join our IRC channel, #soc-help on irc.perl.org, and the mailing list.

Ricardo began work on his grant at the beginning of the month and has made steady progress, completing the first two deliverables (logging and testing libraries) and has begun writing core tests, which should be done over the next few weeks. Has published status updates every few days so far and plans to continue doing so.

While TPF grant program has as its main goal the motivation of Perl users to perform new and challenging projects for the Perl Community, sometimes it fails. Fortunately it doesn't happen with all grantees and all the time.

This time I am closing two grants from Vadim Konovalov: Tcl/Tk Access in Rakudo and Perl Cross-Compilation for WinCE and Linux. We, at TPF, know that Vadim did some work on both grants (mostly on the first), but the grants were accepted in September 2008 and Vadim stopped answering emails and giving feedback a lot of time ago.

We hope Vadim will continue his work whenever he has the motivation and the time, but TPF can't keep the grant open more time.

Curtis Jewell just sent TPF an update on his grant:

The 5 main points of my grant, as far as releasing an improved Strawberry Perl, were:

"Is compiled as a "merge module" (.msm) file that can be included in other .msi files, as well as an independent .msi file."

This was done as of the January 2010 release of Strawberry Perl, although I'm not publicizing it heavily until the April 2010 release.

However, the "Strawberry Perl Professional" alpha that was released in late February uses the merge module that was generated by the January 2010 release as its "underpinnings", and the currently-released-on-CPAN development versions of the Perl::Dist::WiX/Perl::Dist::Strawberry creation toolchain can create and use merge modules.

"Can have the base drive (and possibly directory name) passed in to the merge module."

It turns out that you insert the merge module under a directory entry, so completing the merge module made this automatic. However, this isn't useful without the next point.

"Can be installed to any drive (the top directory may still be named "strawberry" under the root of the selected drive)"

This is what I'm working on currently for the April 2010 release, as well as being able to build a 64-bit version of Strawberry Perl (for 5.11.x+ versions of Perl - which means a non-beta 64-bit version may not be available until May or June)

The intention is to release a beta with this (I think of it as "relocatability") working soon after 5.11.6 or 5.12.0-RC1 is released.

Unfortunately, I've hit a bug in Perl 5.10.1 - it doesn't relocate the vendor/lib directory like the other two standard directories: http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=73562 . I'll need some assistance (i.e. a patch that fixes that bug, or guidance from p5p if more information is needed) in order to get 5.10.1 to relocate safely.

5.11.5 relocates all 3 standard directories, so it's fine, and I can test that relocation works with 5.11.x versions, until a patch can be created for 5.10.1.

"Separates the modules installed with the initial installation from modules that the user / administrator installs, by using the "vendor" directories for module installation that can be configured when compiling Perl."

This was done in the October 2009 release of Strawberry Perl. This has created a problem with implementing the relocation portion of the grant, as noted above.

"Includes a script that saves the settings that local::lib creates within the Windows Registry."

A first draft of this is currently in Adam Kennedy's svn repository (it needs debugged) as http://svn.ali.as/cpan/trunk/App-local-lib-Win32Helper/

Kieren is presently finalizing code for the new Perl Survey and plans to have the new system up and operating soon, when he will conduct a pilot program to shake out the kinks in the project.

After that, all that remains is to react to the results of the pilot, run the survey proper, and analyze the final data gathered from it.

The source code is currently visible on GitHub.

Earlier this year Renée Bäcker from $foo magazine interviewed Richard Dice and me to find out our thoughts on TPF in 2009 and our hopes going forward. An English version [pdf] of the interview is available online.

I am pleased to announce that David Mitchell's grant application has been successful. I would like to thank all the community members who took time to provide feed-back on this proposal and Booking.com whose generous contribution to TPF has allowed us to fund this grant.