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p5pfaq - The perl 5 porters FAQ
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If that doesn't work, find your subscription address - it'll be in the Return-Path header of any mails from p5p to you. If that's God@heaven.af.mil, send mail to <perl5-porters-unsubscribe-God=heaven.af.mil@perl.org>.
Send mail to <perl5-porters-subscribe@perl.org>. To specify God@heaven.af.mil as your subscription address, send mail to <perl5-porters-subscribe-God=heaven.af.mil@perl.org>.
Every message you get from perl5-porters will have an autogenerated >>Return-Path line. For instance: <perl5-porters-return-5523-God=heaven.af.mail@perl.org>
The number in the middle, 5523, is the sequence number. To get the message with a particular sequence number mailed to you, send mail to <perl5-porters-get.5523@perl.org>.
To a range of messages mailed to you in a digest, for instance, the messages with sequence numbers from 4902 to 4950, send mail to <perl5-porters-get.4902-4950@perl.org>. You may request a maximum of 100 messages in a single digest.
More general help on list management can be retrieved by sending a mail to <perl5-porters-help@perl.org>.
Yes, there is, and it's at http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/.
Funny you should mention that. Rafael Garcia-Suarez compiles a weekly summary of the highlights, with links to the archive where more extensive reading is recommended. These can be found at http://use.perl.org/ and at http://nntp.x.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.summary. You can also choose to receive them by mail by subscribing to the <perl5-summary@perl.org> mailing list.
If you want to receive all the messages but batched into a single mail per day, you can subscribe to <perl5-porters-digest@perl.org> instead; send mail to <perl5-porters-digest-subscribe@perl.org>. Be warned that replying to messages from the digest may end up messing up threading on things like the web archive - at least set your outgoing Subject header to the subject of the individual message you're replying to.
Uh, you're reading it, aren't you? Oh well, life is strange. Send mail to <perl5-porters-faq@perl.org> and you'll receive a copy.
perl5-porters is, briefly, for all topics related to the development of the Perl 5 language and the perl 5 interpreter. It's for reporting and fixing bugs, working towards the next version of perl 5, and improving the overall quality of the Perl 5 language.
* Questions about programming Perl.
* Questions covered in the Perl FAQ.
* Spam.
No. However, Larry's advice from perlstyle apply just as well here as it does to Perl programming:
* Be consistent.
* Be nice.
The established medium for messages is plain text. If your email client wants to send things in HTML, please try and discipline it.
First, are you sure it's a bug in Perl itself, not just a bug in your code? Take the problem out of the context of your current program and write a short test program to reproduce it - as short as you possibly can. It's far easily to clearly detect a Perl bug if it's demonstrated in 5 lines of code, rather than buried somewhere in the middle of a 500-line program.
Next, do we already know about it? Check with the bug ticketing system at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/.
It's always worth getting someone else to look it over and confirm that this really is a Perl bug, not just a thinko. If there's nobody around to do that, consider asking on the comp.lang.perl.misc or comp.lang.perl.moderated newsgroups.
Now, if you've really got a bug, type "perlbug" at your prompt, and follow the instructions. It really helps us if you provide: your demonstration code, what you got, what you think you should have got, and the relevant part of the Perl documentation that makes you think that.
Follow the list for a few weeks or months to get an idea of what goes on, and see if anything pops up that you're interested in. Occasionally someone will request a fix, and that's your chance!
If there doesn't appear to be anything you want to or are able to do, have a look in your Perl source kit: you'll find the (outdated) file pod/perltodo.pod - some of the items there are being worked on, so check back-issues of p5p. Look also at the end of the last perldelta.pod. Furthermore, you don't need to be an expert programmer: *anyone* can help with proof-reading, correcting and expanding the documentation, for instance. There's certainly a place for anyone who truly wants to get involved, and over time, you'll find it.
You should also read perlhack.pod, Porting/pumpkin.pod and Porting/patching.pod - these will tell you how to create and submit patches, as well as some more philosophical issues involved in patching Perl. To summarise:
* diff -ruN perl-current perl-patched > patch and append that
verbatim, preferably not as an attachment, to your post.
* Drastic changes to the syntax and/or operation of Perl are
going to be viewed with a lot of suspicion. Start small.
* Patches speak louder than words. Having ideas is good, but
taking the time to implement them will improve their credibility.
* At least one person will think your patch sucks. It's better to
let the code stand on its own merits than get into arguments.
The first thing you should do is relax! We don't bite, and we appreciate people who want to help. Just go for it. However, if you're still worried about whether you should send the patch, email the relevant pumpking for the area you're patching, or one of the referees.
Perl isn't available by anonymous CVS. Perl is, however, kept under development control - it's using a Perforce server which is currently hosted for us at ActiveState. Some pumpkings have write access to this server. There is no public read access to this server - see 3.6 below.
When a change is made on the Perforce server, a patch is generated and placed in the Archive of Perl Changes. This is located at ftp://ftp.linux.activestate.com/pub/staff/gsar/APC/
The directory diffs/ contains patches against the latest release.
There's also a directory called "perl-current" in the APC, which contains the very latest Perforce snapshot of Perl. This is the closest it gets to an anonymous CVS, and this snapshot is what, ideally, you should patch against.
Since downloading the whole thing from FTP is wasteful, you can either keep yourself up-to-date using the diffs as mentioned above, or you can use rsync - the following command will update the directory "bleadperl" on your computer to match perl-current:
rsync -auvz rsync://ftp.linux.activestate.com/perl-current/ bleadperl/
The repository of the Perl Perforce server is laid out something like this:
/----+-----perl
+-----... (older or private branches)
+-----maint-5.6------perl
+-----maint-5.6------perl-5.6.2
+-----maint-5.8------perl
Each "branch" contains an independent version of Perl, but Perforce knows how to integrate patches between them.
The current development version of perl, otherwise known as bleadperl, lives in the mainline, /perl. See Porting/repository.pod in your perl distribution for more details.
You didn't read Porting/pumpkin.pod, did you? :) A pumpking is the person who holds the patch pumpkin, the responsibility for co-ordinating patches on a specific area.
*The* pumpking is the person who holds the patch pumpkin for Perl itself, what other projects call the "release engineer". For perl 5.8, the pumpking was Jarkko Heitaniemi. For perl 5.10, that's Hugo van der Sanden.
The FAQ was last updated Fri Sep 26 2003.
Its primary author was Simon Cozens. It's currently maintained by Rafael Garcia-Suarez.
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