So they maintain makemaker/ ... modules used for installing/testing perl modules, aka the toolchain

G'day stevieb,

"What/Who is the Perl Toolchain Gang?"

Perl Toolchain Gang

"I've been seeing people's (CPAN) names that are significant to Perl across the board."

Yes, there's certainly quite a few leading lights in that mob.

I've found it difficult to find a place where I could see all recent bugs in CPAN modules.

RT has them. Go to the end of the list for the most recent reports.

The Perl Toolchain Gang was created as a location on GitHub for collaboration on the various "toolchain" modules for Perl. These are the modules used in the downloading, building, testing, and installing CPAN modules. Before the organization was created, many of the modules didn't have active primary developers, and some were suffering from a lack of maintenance because of that. Creating a place for group ownership of the modules has helped us organize development more and made it easier to keep track of changes and issues as they happen. Also, not everything that is considered part of the toolchain is managed in this organization.

While you can see the list of members of the GitHub organization, it is really more of a loose collection of interested people. People who have contributed to the modules enough get added to the org to help with managing issues and to have a central location for collaboration. Each module generally has one or two release managers who takes responsibility for merging code and making releases.

There are also has various consensus documents, which discuss how parts of the toolchain and should work. These have primarily been written based on discussions at the Perl QA Hackathon, along with discussions across IRC (#toolchain on irc.perl.org), mailing lists, and other conferences.

To keep track of development of perl itself, the best place to watch is the perl5-porters mailing list. That is where all of the discussion about the development of perl takes place. It also includes all of the issues submitted to rt.perl.org.

Seeing all recent bugs in CPAN modules is unlikely to be very useful, but you can get part way there with various searches at rt.cpan.org. There is a fair amount of spam though, and that is reports across all of CPAN, so it will include lots of modules you most likely aren't interested in.

Lots of modules have also moved to using GitHub Issues rather than rt.cpan.org. For those you just have to find the various repos that you are interested in and watch them.