Re: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community

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

Comment on Re: Advice on the best way to help the Perl 5 community

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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 Still, one week old isn't all that out of date, it's enough for most day-to-day work.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]