Through a post on Perl5-Porters, Nick raises some thoughts regarding the ongoing maintenance of Perl 5. He floats the idea of a paid full-time job for error report triage. But that's not the point I found so interesting that it moved me to post a link to it here.

The thing that I found interesting is that there is a list of Perl 5 To-do items ordered by level:

• Tasks that only need Perl knowledge
• Tasks that need a little sysadmin-type knowledge
• Tasks that need a little C knowledge
• Tasks that need a knowledge of XS
• Tasks that need a knowledge of the interpreter
• Big projects

grinder is featuring a "Perl5 To-do of the week" in his excellent Perl5-porters summaries. I'd like to improve the visibility of the current (or past) To-do item without duplicating grinder's work or having grinder repost his To-do here. But I think these To-dos are a great way for you to XP-whoreparticipate. You could pick the current To-do of the week and write a more thorough analysis of the steps needed for the implementation, together with more code. Another approach could be to pick any current To-do and do that. The third alternative, of course, would be to just go ahead and implement the current To-do item completely.

There are bugs outstanding on pure-perl modules like the Pod processors, especially the HTML creation is supposed to be better. There also is the To-do of writing a small checker that checks that no libc functions with high potential for security holes are used by Perl:

  nm libperl.a | ./miniperl -alne '$o = $F[0] if /:$/; print "$o $F[1]
+" if $F[0] eq "U" && $F[1] =~ /^(?:strn?c(?:at|py)|v?sprintf|gets)$/'
[download]

I think these To-dos are a great way to get started doing some work on Perl. Having a look through the To-do list will likely turn up interesting items.