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p5pfaq - The perl 5 porters FAQ

Administration

Help! How do I unsubscribe?

Send mail to <perl5-porters-unsubscribe@perl.org>, and await a response. Once you reply to the response, you'll be unsubscribed.

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>.

I'm not subscribed - how do I subscribe?

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>.

How do I retrieve old messages?

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>.

Is there a web archive?

Yes, there is, and it's at http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/.

perl5-porters is too big! Is there a digest?

Funny you should mention that. Rafael Garcia-Suarez and afterwards David Landgren used to compile 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://www.nntp.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.

How do I get this document?

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.

Questions about perl5-porters itself

What is perl5-porters for?

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.

What is perl5-porters not for?

    * Questions about programming Perl.
    * Questions covered in the Perl FAQ.
    * Spam.

Are there any rules?

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.

Development questions

How do I report a bug?

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.

I want to get involved! What can I do?

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.

I've created a patch, but I'd like someone to check it over before I post it to the list. What should I do?

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.

Is Perl in CVS?

Perl is actually available inside a git repository. git ( http://git-scm.com/ ) is a popular, distributed and open-source version control system. To learn more about checking out the Perl source using git see:

http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/HEAD:/pod/perlrepository.pod

What is the APC?

When a change was made on the Perforce server, a patch was 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.

All of this has probably became irrelevant after the switch to git.

What is perl-current?

perl-current used to bet the very latest Perforce snapshot of Perl. Now the recommended way is to use git.

What is bleadperl? maintperl?

bleadperl is the term that is now used for the git blead branch.

maintperl are the various maintenance branches:

  remotes/origin/maint-5.004
  remotes/origin/maint-5.005
  remotes/origin/maint-5.10
  remotes/origin/maint-5.6
  remotes/origin/maint-5.8

One for each released version of Perl.

Who's Who

What's a pumpking?

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.

What's the pumpking?

*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.

AUTHORS

The FAQ was last updated Mon Jun 22 2009.

Its primary author was Simon Cozens. It's currently maintained by Rafael Garcia-Suarez.