[I started this a long time ago and got caught up in some other things. It's still not complete, but I figure the monks can fill in the rest. I'll update the original post if people have anything to add. I may have missed some things, and will be happy to add to this list any significant events. ]
Now that we're in 2007, past the holidays, and I've just finished Mastering Perl, I looked back into 2006 to see what happened in Perl. People proposed, discussed, and started on many things, but I limited my list to actual events or things that came to fruition and that had a community-wide interest. chromatic did this for The Year in Perl, 2005. Update: Also look ahead to The Year in Perl, 2007.
Perl 5 development continues in both its maintenance and development branches. The release history is noted in perlhist and the version changes are in perldelta.
In the stable branch (those with an even number in the minor release version, as in the 8 in Perl 5.8), pumpking Nicholas Clark released Perl 5.8.8-RC1, the first "release candidate" on January 20 and made it the official release on January 31. The previous release, Perl 5.8.7, was in May 2005, so 5.8.8 stuck to the rough schedule of a release every six months. Most notably, Perl 5.8.8 fixed a security problem with sprintf, which I discuss later. There was not another release of Perl in the stable branch during 2006.
Release Date Delta 5.8.0 2002-Jul-18 5.8.1 2003-Sep-25 1+ years 5.8.2 2003-Nov-05 < 6 months 5.8.3 2004-Jan-14 < 6 months 5.8.4 2004-Apr-21 < 6 months 5.8.5 2004-Jul-19 < 6 months 5.8.6 2004-Nov-27 < 6 months 5.8.7 2005-May-30 6+ months 5.8.8 2006-Jan-31 6+ months
On the experimental branch (those with an even odd number in the minor release version, as in the 9 in Perl 5.9), Rafael Garcia-Suarez released Perl 5.9.3 on January 28 and Perl 5.9.4 on August 15. It's likely that Perl 5.9.4 will be Perl 5.10.0, the next minor release in the stable branch. The Perl 5.9 branch includes several features from the development of Perl 6, including the defined-or operators (// and err), the switch-like given-when and foreach-when control structures, state variables, and the say keyword, among many others. Module::Build is a core module in Perl 5.9, a necessary step to the eventual elimination of ExtUtils::MakeMaker for Perl module installation. The regular expression engine is no longer recursive, leading to much better performance and the elimination of some pathologic cases that had severe memory consequences.
Adam Kennedy (using the handle Alias on use.perl) offered a bounty of a vertical meter of beer for anyone who could create a "Windows Perl installer that works and can install XS modules from CPAN normally, as we might expect from a Linux install". Camelpack, from Stephen Steneker (aka stennie) included a C compiler with the ActiveState's ActivePerl, and Carl Franks (aka fireartist) created Vanilla Perl, which "provides a Perl 5.8.8 distribution that is as close to the Perl core as possible, with a small set of upgraded versions of dual CPAN/core modules that have win32-specific fixes." Vanilla Perl gave way to Strawberry Perl, "to provide a more practical Win32 Perl release for experienced Perl developers to experiment and test the installation of various CPAN modules under Win32 conditions, and to provide a useful platform for experienced Perl developers to start doing real work."
Adam choose Stephen Steneker's Perl CamelPack as the winner of the vertical meter of beer, although Carl Franks's Vanilla Perl was a close second.
The interest in Perl for Windows motivated the creation of win32.perl.org, a wiki for Perl users on Windows.
During 2006, Perl had two significant security problems. The first was disclosed on June 5 and involved a problem with ActiveState Perl 5.8.8.817 in which users could create a sitecustomize.pl file in the site/lib directory, thus affecting user programs. This bug only affected ActivePerl.
Perl 5.8.8, released on January 31, fixed a security problem with sprintf and Sys::Syslog discovered in Webmin used the syslog function and passed user data directly to format specificer of sprintf. This led to the discovery of a buffer overflow problem in Perl's sprintf. Since then, Sebastien Aperghis-Tramoni has been maintaining Sys::Syslog
On August 23, Jesse Vincent declared that the PONIE (Perl On New Interpreter Engine) was dead. The project, which was to connect Perl 5 and parrot as part of the Perl 5 to Perl 6 migration plan, was dead and that there was no point in continuing. Although ultimately unsuccessful, it did lead to many improvements in Perl 5 as Nicholas Clark and Arthur Bergman worked to make the Perl core compatible with a parrot interpreter. Several of these fixes made it into Perl 5.9.
CMP Media officially stopped publishing The Perl Journal, and combined its archives with their "Lightweight Languages" section on their website. CMP took over The Perl Journal in 2001 after Earthweb went bust. Earthweb had purchased the magazine from Jon Orwant in 1999. The Perl Journal was briefly an inline supplement to SysAdmin Magazine until mid-2002, and then a web-only magazine as PDF files.
The Perl Review continued publishing quarterly issues, both in print and on the web.
Randal Schwartz continues to publish regular Perl columns in Linux Magazine and Unix Review.
Every month had a Perl conference or workshop, save for January, August, and October. If you remember any from then, let me know. I'm now keeping track of Perl events in the Perl community events as a Google calendar.
The Perl jobs board (http://jobs.perl.org) continues its upward trend in number of posts
---------------------------------------------------------------------- +-------------------- Year | Total | Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug S +ep Oct Nov Dec ------------------------------------------------------------------ +------------------------ 2001 | 280 | 0 2 8 21 40 34 33 29 +34 30 35 14 2002 | 413 | 34 33 35 16 45 26 37 46 +33 42 31 35 2003 | 560 | 43 36 56 56 21 39 44 64 +53 52 52 44 2004 | 949 | 75 58 78 88 74 88 82 87 +65 87 85 82 2005 | 1429 | 93 110 120 135 135 125 115 113 1 +06 132 144 101 2006 | 1857 | 164 138 157 151 166 153 140 176 1 +52 172 179 109 ------------------------------------------------------------------ +------------------------
Jay Hannah keeps Perl Mongers user groups running. Perl Mongers started by providing free web hosting, domain names, mailing lists, and other central services to make it as easy as possible for new user groups to start and to attract Perl hackers in their area. The maintenance of these services has always been a thankless job, and the Perl community is fortunate that Jay Hannah keeps it working.
Josh McAdams, the host of Perlcast and the organizer of the 2006 Yet Another Perl Conference in Chicago, has made quite the name for himself since he exploded into Perl community about two years ago when he was in Arkansas and started Perlcast, the first regular podcast about Perl. Since then, he’s interviewed Perl luminaries as well as people connected to the Perl community, re-vitalized the Chicago Perl Mongers, and has been an all-around nice guy.
Randal L. Schwartz has been involved with Perl since its early days, and the perl5porters picture David Adler displayed on the large screen next to the stage showed a much younger Randal alongside younger versions of Jarkko Hietaniemi, Gurusamy Sarathy, and Larry Wall (although some did not look much younger, prompting someone to loudly shout “Pudge looks the same!”). Randal has been a tireless advocate of Perl and the community of Perl, and his philosophy of giving back to the community is the epitome of the White Camel.
Thanks to Ovid, Perl Foundation Grants Secretary, for some of this information
In January, TPF awarded Nicholas Clark $11,000 to work on general improvements to Perl 5, including Unicode support, source filters in @INC, lexical pragmas, and general performance and memory-use improvements. He finished his work in May.
On August 22, TPF awarded Christopher Laco $1,500 to work on Mango, "a Web 2.0 Ecommerce Solution built using the Handel and Catalyst frameworks". As of January 2007, Curtis Poe reported that Christopher was just starting work.
On August 22, TPF awarded Brian Ingerson $3,000 to port PyYAML (a Python implementation of YAML 1.1) to to Perl. Progress has been slow, and Brian tracks his at progress at http://trac.yaml.com/trac/wiki/PlYaml.
Stonehenge Consulting Services awarded two "Rock Star" Grants in 2006:
In 2004, after being a Perl programmer for a few years, Josh McAdams wanted to do more to contribute to the Perl community. Podcasting was just catching on at the time, but there wasn't a podcast dedicated specifically to Perl so in March 2005 he started his own. At first it was just him talking about Perl, but he quickly moved to interviewing people working in Perl. After he traveled to the 2005 YAPC::NA in Toronto to interview as many people as he could, Stonehenge offered him a Rock Star Grant to over his expenses for the 2006 O'Reilly Open Source Convention.
Rob Kinyon has been working in Perl and contributing to the community for several years. In 2006 he took over maintenance of the widely used DBM::Deep module, which provides easy-to-use data persistence in pure Perl. From working with Stonehenge on previous projects, Rob had mentioned several things he had planned to improve DBM::Deep, although he was short on time to work on them for free. In November 2006, Stonehenge awarded Rob a Rock Star Grant to spend two months working on DBM::Deep. He used his grant to re-write the DBM::Deep core and add transaction support to the module.
In reply to The Year in Perl, 2006 by brian_d_foy
| For: | Use: | ||
| & | & | ||
| < | < | ||
| > | > | ||
| [ | [ | ||
| ] | ] |