Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community

aflott has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by moritz (Cardinal) on Sep 02, 2008 at 15:39 UTC
Things that would help perl and the community, in no particular order, additionally to what you already do: Answer questions from beginners, here or in IRC, mailing lists, newsgroups, ... Walk through the perl rt and look at old tickets. Some of them have been fixed but not yet closed; close those (or notify p5p that they should be closed) For errors with unknown source, bisect to find the responsible change Raise funds for perl 5 development The p5p plans to move to git as revision control system; that movement needs to be managed and supported by a few people with system administrator skills. Smoke-test both perl and cpan modules If you run on linux or *BSD, help your distributor to build and maintain perl packages. If you use windows, you can help the Strawberry Perl people, or even activestate (if they want help) The perl foundation occasionally looks for people who support them with their paperworks, watch their blog and volunteer if you feel qualified	[reply]
Re^2: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by aflott (Beadle) on Sep 02, 2008 at 20:10 UTC
I'm glad that they are moving to git as I've been using it for around a year and couldn't ever go back to anything else. The only repositories that looked mildly official were the ones from Perl Git Repositories and I couldn't find any thread on p5p regarding it (just the stuff from the wiki). The utsl.genz.nl repo doesn't look up to date as the last change in origin/blead is from 8/26/08. Is there some other repo that would be better to use? That being said, I really like the bisect idea. Thanks!	[reply]
Re^3: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by moritz (Cardinal) on Sep 02, 2008 at 20:25 UTC
The most official repo is still git://utsl.gen.nz/perl, but it's not always kept up to date (yet). Still, one week old isn't all that out of date, it's enough for most day-to-day work. There's a current discussion todo list for moving to git, the earlier discussions where Feb/Mar 2008.	[reply]
Re^3: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by FunkyMonk (Bishop) on Sep 02, 2008 at 21:28 UTC
The thread was "Switching to Git" from early March (I only have a couple of messages from that thread archived and the earliest was the 6^th) but there was some earlier discussion (but still in March IIRC). You should be able to find the thread using the archive. The current plan is to switch to git once 5.10.1 has been released but there seem to be many hinderances to that plan that I think will take some time to work out. (Or, perhaps it won't. They're a very clever bunch.)	[reply]
Re^3: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by blazar (Canon) on Sep 03, 2008 at 21:39 UTC
Incidentally, just the other day I stumbled upon a post of audreyt's in her Pugs blog dealing precisely with "Short notes on migrating a SVK mirror to Git." Actually, so short to be suitable for being "saved as a shell script:" appearently for practical reasons she's decided to move Pugs to Git too. `--` If you can't understand the incipit, then please check the IPB Campaign.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by Anonymous Monk on Sep 02, 2008 at 21:55 UTC
You could always work on Win32::GUI (as it's both UI and low-level) if you are feeling brave (and have Windows). There's enough bugs (not to mention lack of sufficient documentation) to keep you occupied for years! :-)	[reply]
Re^3: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by Anonymous Monk on Sep 03, 2008 at 03:20 UTC
I think it would be better to work on wxWidgets/Tk/Prima even Qt (or X11, old). Why? They're all more portable than Win32::GUI	[reply]
Re: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Sep 02, 2008 at 17:09 UTC
Whichever way you choose to go, just make sure that you get at least tacit nod of pre-approval for what you intend to tackle. There is nothing more intensely frustrating than expending time and effort on getting up to speed on something, and then developing your fix/patch/module only to have it rejected by some faceless, self-assigned jobs-worth on a mailing list. Oh And bear in mind that tasks that have been around for a while and aren't being tackled are usually being bypassed for a reason. Whether its because they are just damned hard, or more often, because they are as boring as hell. Actually, there is something more annoying. Having a planning permission request rejected or modified because some local councilor thinks they are "too original". Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error. "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority". In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice. "Too many [] have been sedated by an oppressive environment of political correctness and risk aversion."	[reply]
Re: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by pajout (Curate) on Sep 02, 2008 at 18:38 UTC
When I decided to publish my module on CPAN, I have not found good manual which describes all metadata exhaustively, as well as helper modules (ExtUtils::MakeMaker e.t.c.). Perhaps I did not find correctly, perhaps such manual does not exist. It would be very nice, and, it would help many authors, to have such manual.	[reply]
Re^2: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by tilly (Archbishop) on Sep 02, 2008 at 19:01 UTC
There was a grant proposal to solve exactly that problem in the latest Perl Foundation grant round. It was accepted but not funded. Part of the reason why it was prioritized lower than other projects is that the grant submitter is working on another grant already. If anyone is interested in tackling that project, Schwern would be a good person to contact.	[reply]
Re^3: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by FunkyMonk (Bishop) on Sep 02, 2008 at 21:34 UTC
accepted but not funded I wondered about that phrase when I first saw it in the announcement. What, exactly, does it mean?	[reply]
Re^4: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by moritz (Cardinal) on Sep 02, 2008 at 21:51 UTC
Re^5: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by FunkyMonk (Bishop) on Sep 02, 2008 at 22:00 UTC
Re: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by DrHyde (Prior) on Sep 04, 2008 at 10:15 UTC
If you want a project that's not particularly flashy (and so is progressing very slowly) but oh so very necessary, how about seeing if there's anything you can do to get CPAN-testers version 2 off the ground? It's a complete rethink of how CPAN-testers works, moving away from clunky email-based reporting to having reports submitted to a central repository which will allow individual authors much more control over what reports they see. The current work is co-ordinated via the cpan-testers-discuss mailing list, to subscribe send email to cpan-testers-discuss-subscribe@perl.org. update: corrected email address for subscribing to the list	[reply]
Re: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by Anonymous Monk on Sep 02, 2008 at 17:27 UTC
You could work on making various things less obtuse, in an effort to bring more new people into the perl 5 community...	[reply]
Re^2: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community by kyle (Abbot) on Sep 02, 2008 at 18:45 UTC
Some examples would help here...a sort of to-do list, if you will. Care to elaborate?	[reply]