Well, it's taken me 6 weeks of evenings and the odd weekend, but I'm proud to say the new http://www.perl.org/ site has just gone live. This is a complete redesign and content review. Hopefully it's cleaner and easier for people to actually get the information they are after. Whilst I was at it I also implemented this skin for http://dbi.perl.org/ and http://learn.perl.org/ (which needs a lot more loving now you can actually see what's there... not much). My work (http://www.foxtons.co.uk/) have donated some of my time, and also some of the designers on my team's time, without which it would have taken even longer. So enjoy!

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(This is a copy of an email to the BioPerl mailing list)Dear BioPeopleSince we added a "Live Support Chat" link to the frontpage of the Strawberry Perl website ( http://strawberryperl.com/ ) we've noticed that one of the main types of visitors that we see in the IRC channel ( #win32 on irc.perl.org ) is biologists trying to install variousthings.As a result, for the October 2009 release of Strawberry Perl, we've prioritised adding support for CPAN-installation of BioPerl.Changes include a major improvement to crypto support which provides OpenSSL and support for https:// URLs, we now ship Postgres and MySQL DBI drivers in the default installation, and we have added Berkely DB support (which previously prevented us meeting the dependencies for the BioPerl distribution).I'm happy to report that we now believe we are in a position to officially support the installation of BioPerl on Strawberry Perl.Prior to the official release next week, we would appreciate testing from the BioPerl community.Release candidate installers for the October release are available at the following URLs http://strawberryperl.com/download/strawberryperl-5.10.1.0.msi http://strawberryperl.com/download/strawberryperl-5.8.9.3.msi Once installed, run Start -> Program Files -> Strawberry Perl -> CPAN ClientFrom the CPAN client command line, run "install BioPerl" and selectthe default options.Once installed, you should be able to do anything you do normally with a BioPerl install.Assuming all goes well in this release, for the next release January 2010 we plan to also produce a "Strawberry Perl Professional" distribution that will bundle BioPerl as part of the default installation, as well as a Perl IDE and other useful packages.Success or failure of the release candidate can be reported either here [the BioPerl list] or to #win32 on irc.perl.org.Adam K

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Milo had been caught red-handed in the act of plundering his countrymen, and, as a result, his stock had never been higher. He proved good as his word when a rawboned major from Minnesota curled his lip in rebellious disavowal and demanded his share of the syndicate Milo kept saying everybody owned. Milo met the challenge by writing the words "A Share" on the nearest scrap of paper and handing it away with a virtuous disdain that won the envy and admiration of almost everyone who knew him. His glory was at a peak, and Colonel Cathcart, who knew and admired his war record, was astonished by the deferential humility with which Milo presented himself at Group Headquarters and made his fantastic appeal for more hazardous assignment. - Joseph Heller, Catch-22 It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.1. This is the second DEVELOPMENT release in the 5.11.x series leading to a stable release of Perl 5.12.0. You can find a list of high-profile changes in this release in the file "perl5111delta.pod" inside the distribution. You can (or will shortly be able to) download the 5.11.1 release from: http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.11.1/

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salva writes "The Madrid Perl Mongers are having a social meeting on Wednesday October 21 from 19:30 (localtime) at El Rincon Guay, Embajadores 62, Lavapies, Madrid. Everybody is invited! Just come and enjoy some "cañas y pinchos" with us while we talk about Perl!"

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STBEY writes "I think Strawberry Perl is absolutely great!But... What do you do on Windows machines where you do not have Administrator rights, or no rights at all to install anything, to be more precise?Such as e.g. in large companies, with very restrictive user policies?And by "installing" I mean running an installer, configuring the binary and changing the registry like Strawberry Perl does. What often DOES work on these machines though is copying files. So we need a Perl binary which will install on any drive, just by unpacking a ZIP archive, for instance.And if you don't have the rights to change the system's PATH environment variable, you need a batch script to call Perl for you, to be copied into one of the directories in the PATH, or to any directory you have write permissions to, and from which you will be calling Perl. It may seem awkward, but in return you will have a fully-fledged Perl running on your crippled PC.If this is what you need, have a look at http://www.engelschall.com/u/sb/download/win32/perl-5.10.1-win32-bin-0001.zip.(See the README.txt file in the root directory for all the gory details) The installation is simpler than it sounds.Hope this helps!Enjoy!"

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http://perlmonks.org/?node=Corion asked about measuring memory allocation in IRC but I was reminded of something I've poked at recently which is measuring how much memory is copy-on-write shared between forked mod_perl processes. Thus far, when on Linux the only answer I know of is to use the exmap kernel module. The main page is http://www.berthels.co.uk/exmap/ but Dave Olszewski wrote some bug fixes for it at http://github.com/cxreg/exmap. exmap uses a kernel module to add a new /proc/exmap file. To read physical page stats, write the PID to this file, then read the results. The exmap distribution comes with a C++ and perl GTK program to interpret the kernel data. Below is what I know of the format for the kernel data.To use: $ echo $pid > /proc/exmap$ cat /proc/exmapVMA 400000 871 0 1c6e71 0 1c6e81 0 1d328... $ grep 400000 /proc/$pid/maps00400000-00457000 r-xp 00000000 08:01 722755 /usr/bin/screen The sections provided by /proc/exmap correspond to each of the chunks in /proc/$pid/maps. Each line then details a page, whether it is swapped, and whether it is writable. (    VMA $address $page_count    ( $resident $writable $page_id )+)+ Anyway, just thought I'd share. If you know a better trick, I'd love to hear of it. When I next get around to improving my search servers I'll likely actually try to use this but for now this is just a tool I think I plan to use but haven't done serious work with yet.

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jesse writes "Whispers of an "evil power" were heard in lines at dairy         shops, in streetcars, stores, arguments, kitchens, suburban         and long-distance trains, at stations large and small,         in dachas and on beaches. Needless to say, truly mature         and cultured people did not tell these stories about an         evil power's visit to the capital. In fact, they even         made fun of them and tried to talk sense into those who         told them. Nevertheless, facts are facts, as they say,         and cannot simply be dismissed without explanation:         somebody had visited the capital. The charred cinders         of Griboyedov alone, and many other things besides,         confirmed it. Cultured people shared the point of view         of the investigating team: it was the work of a gang of         hypnotists and ventriloquists magnificently skilled in         their art.                         M. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.0. Perl 5.11.0 is a DEVELOPMENT release. We're making it available to you today to make it easy for you to test your software on what will eventually become Perl 5.12. This release is the result of over two years of development by a global community of developers.

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nuba writes "We are proud to announce the YAPC::Brasil 2009, to be held from 30/October to 1/November in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We have humble goals this year: to put forth the greatest YAPC::Brasil ever, celebrate the Joy of Perl among ourselves, and tempt everyone else to join us in developing the programming language that has the happiest users! We hope to deliver expertise in all levels, from introductory workshops {say "hello Perl!"} to perlguts, SMOP, Reaction and Metaprogramming to list a few and also a good number of slots for lightning talks to encourage newcomers! Niterói holds one of the highest Human Development Indexes (HDI) of the country, and stays just a 15-minute ferry boat ride away from the famous, infamous and glamorous Rio de Janeiro. If you happen to be nearby, hop aboard and come join us! More information: http://yapcbrasil.org.br/2009 http://twitter.com/yapcbrasil #yapcbrasil09 organizacao@yapcbrasil.org.br"

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particle writes "On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announcethe September 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #21 "Seattle".Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1].The tarball for the September 2009 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads . Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and the frequentaddition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we recommend building Rakudofrom the latest source, available from the main repository at github.More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo. Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code namedafter a Perl Mongers group. September 2009 is code named "Seattle" for theenthusiasm they have shown for Perl 6 during monthly meetings, and thefeedback, encouragement and support given me for the past several years. Since the 2009-08 release, Rakudo Perl builds from an "installedParrot" instead of using Parrot's build tree. This release of Rakudorequires Parrot 1.6.0. For the latest information on building andusing Rakudo Perl, see the README file section titled "Building andinvoking Rakudo". (Quick note: the "--gen-parrot" option stillautomatically downloads and builds Parrot as before, if you preferthat approach.) Also, unlike previous versions of Rakudo Perl, the "perl6"(or "perl6.exe") executables only work when invoked from theRakudo root directory until a "make install" is performed.Running "make install" will install Rakudo and its librariesinto the Parrot installation that was used to build it, and thenthe executables will work when invoked from any directory. Some of the specific major changes and improvements occuringwith this release include: * Rakudo is now passing 15,497 spectests, an increase of 3,128     passing tests since the August 2009 release. With this release     Rakudo is now passing 71.5% of the available spectest suite. * Rakudo now supports contextual variables. * Rakudo now supports the rational (Rat) data type. * Rakudo now supports overloading of many of the builtin operators,     many of which are now defined in the core setting. Many have     also been improved to be more faithful to the specification     with respect to types and coercions. * Substantially improved support for trait handling. Most of the     "built-in" traits are now defined in the core setting. * The %*ENV variable now works properly for modifying the process environment. Since the Perl 6 specification is still in flux, some deprecated featureshave been removed from Rakudo. Prominently among those are:   * '=$handle' is deprecated in favor of '$handle.get' (one line)       and '$handle.lines' (all lines).   * 'int $obj' is deprecated in favor of '$obj.Int'. The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors formaking Rakudo Perl possible. If you would like to contribute,see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help , ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.orgmailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode. The next release of Rakudo (#22) is scheduled for October 22, 2009.A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 isavailable in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudodevelopment releases are scheduled to occur two days after eachParrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month. Have fun! References:[1] Parrot, http://parrot.org/"

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The Perl 5 developer team is pleased to announce the Perl Release 5.10.1, the first maintenance release of Perl 5.10. The CPAN ftp multiplexor will pick a mirror close to you. You can download the source in bz2 format (11121414 bytes).

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O'Reilly dropped the regular price of e-books for Learning Perl and Mastering Perl to $9.99. I volunteered to be the guinea pig for pricing experiments. I specifically want to see if this makes it easier to get these books when access to the hard-copies is prohibitively expensive. You can get these books in Mobi, PDF, or ePub directly from O'Reilly. I'd like to do more of these sorts of experiments to get the books into as many hands as possible. The $9.99 price is the regular price, so all existing discount and coupon codes apply. For instance, you can still use the 35% user group discount to get either book for $6.50. These are the updated versions of the books too. All reported errata should be corrected, so they are slightly fresher than the hard copies. Remember, the great thing about PDFs is that they don't take up any shelf space. Buy as many as you like!

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kyle writes "On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announcethe August 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #20 "PDX".Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine [1].The tarball for the August 2009 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads . Due to the continued rapid pace of Rakudo development and thefrequent addition of new Perl 6 features and bugfixes, we continueto recommend that people wanting to use or work with Rakudo obtainthe latest source directly from the main repository at github.More details are available at http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo . Rakudo Perl follows a monthly release cycle, with each release code namedafter a Perl Mongers group. August 2009 is code named "PDX" for thePortland Perl Mongers. PDX.pm has been home to several Rakudocontributors (chromatic, Allison Randal, and more) and PDX.pm hasheld meetings that have produced feature and bugfix patches for Rakudo. Beginning with this release, Rakudo Perl builds from an "installedParrot" instead of using Parrot's build tree. This release of Rakudorequires Parrot 1.5.0. For the latest information on building andusing Rakudo Perl, see the README file section titled "Building andinvoking Rakudo". (Quick note: the "--gen-parrot" option stillautomatically downloads and builds Parrot as before, if you preferthat approach.) Also, unlike previous versions of Rakudo Perl, the "perl6"(or "perl6.exe") executables only work when invoked from theRakudo root directory until a "make install" is performed.Running "make install" will install Rakudo and its librariesinto the Parrot installation that was used to build it, and thenthe executables will work when invoked from any directory. Some of the specific major changes and improvements occuringwith this release include: * Rakudo is now passing 12,369 spectests, an increase of 493     passing tests since the July 2009 release. With this release     Rakudo is now passing 69.98% of the available spectest suite. * We now have a much cleaner traits implementation. Many of the     Perl 6 built-in traits are now implemented in Perl 6, and     user-defined traits can now be defined and applied to classes     and roles. * The 'hides' trait on classes can make one class hide another. * Many not-yet-implemented operators and features now provide     more helpful error messages instead of simply producing     parse errors. * The ROADMAP has been substantially updated and includes some     details regarding the "Rakudo Star" release [2]. * Embedded comments now require backticks (Perl 6 specification change). Since the Perl 6 specification is still in flux, some deprecated featureswill be removed from Rakudo. Prominently among those are:   * '=$handle' is deprecated in favor of '$handle.get' (one line)       and '$handle.lines' (all lines).   * 'int $obj' is deprecated in favor of '$obj.Int'. The development team thanks all of our contributors and sponsors formaking Rakudo Perl possible. If you would like to contribute,see http://rakudo.org/how-to-help , ask on the perl6-compiler@perl.orgmailing list, or ask on IRC #perl6 on freenode. The next release of Rakudo (#21) is scheduled for September 17, 2009.A list of the other planned release dates and codenames for 2009 isavailable in the "docs/release_guide.pod" file. In general, Rakudodevelopment releases are scheduled to occur two days after eachParrot monthly release. Parrot releases the third Tuesday of each month. Have fun! References:[1] Parrot, http://parrot.org/ [2] Rakudo Star, http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39411  "

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Perl 5.10 Release Candidate 2 has been released, two (busy) weeks after the RC1. As Dave Mitchell, the 5.10 pumpking, says, I'm not planning to change anything between now and final release unless it's a real showstopper; so, help making sure there are no showstoppers left before the final release!

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The Release Candidate 1 of perl 5.10.1 has been uploaded to CPAN. This is the first maintenance release of the 5.10 series; it provides numerous bug fixes, improvements and core module updates from CPAN. Read the full list of changes in the perldelta document. Help us testing the RC1 before the final release!

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The most common question I get from people who aren't generally involved with Perl 6 development is: "When will Perl 6 be finished?" In some ways the wording of this question bugs me a bit, because the word "finished" implies there's a point at which we all say "We're done" and development ceases (or at least moves to some other phase). But there really isn't a "finish line" for Perl 6, there are just stages of development at which more and more people are able to make use of whatever is currently available. So, once we eliminate the notion of "finished", the wording is often changed to try to make it more tractable, often by asking when there will be a "stable release", or when the specification will be frozen so an implementation can be completed, or many other variations on the theme. I understand the assumptions behind questions like these, but at the same time part of me thinks "Huh? Those questions don't really fit with the way things really happen in language development..." The truth is that language design is an evolutionary process, with the design and implementation efforts serving to influence and guide further progress in the other. (See "whirlpool model".) But there's another important input to the process: "real-world" application programs. We need to know how Perl 6 is actually being used in order to finish parts of the specification and implementation. Indeed, there are parts of Perl 6 (e.g., concurrency) where the specification is incomplete or underspecified precisely because we need input from people writing Perl 6 applications. But this poses a problem of sorts, because if programmers are waiting for Perl 6 to "finish" before they start using it to write programs, and if Perl 6 is blocking on feedback from applications and implementations before it can progress, then we have a deadlock of sorts. So, we need a way to break the deadlock. To me, one good answer is to start making releases of Perl 6 that may not implement the entire Perl 6 specification, but that application writers will feel comfortable enough to start using in their projects. I've started to call these "useful releases" or "usable releases". While it might not have every feature described in the Perl 6 synopses, enough features will be present that can make it a reasonable choice for application programs. In doing this, I'd like to also refocus conversations to avoid words like "finished" and "stable", because they have such varied and strong meanings in this context. So, here's what the Rakudo Perl project is going to do: We will make an "official", intermediate, useful and usable release of Perl 6 (an appropriate subset) by Spring 2010.Of course, we have to decide what will will be included (and excluded) in this intermediate "official release". At the Rakudo BOF on Monday we held a lively discussion about what the release could look like, what needed to be present, and how it could be packaged. During the hackathons and days following YAPC::EU we'll be drafting and publishing the more detailed blueprint for the release. But one of our guiding principles will be to "under-promise and over-deliver", to make it clear what can be done with the release, and to make it very clear which parts of Perl 6 are not yet supported in the release. A short list of things we know will be in the release (that Rakudo doesn't already have): use of the STD.pm grammar for parsing, laziness, better support for modules, fewer bugs, better error messages, better speed. Again, our goal is to make something that is reasonable for people to start using, even if it doesn't meet all of the requirements for Perl 6.0.0. We've also had discussions about what to call the intermediate release. We've considered tagging it as "Rakudo 1.0", but some of us think that the "1.0" name might tend towards "overpromise". We also considered things like "0.5" or "0.9", but these come with the message of "not ready for use", and that's not what the impression we want to make either. So, yesterday morning I finally got around to thinking about it as "Rakudo 'whatever'". In Perl 6 the * term is used to signify "whatever", so that leads to a working name of "Rakudo *" (or "Rakudo Star"). So, the focus of the Rakudo project is to release "Rakudo Star" in Spring 2010 as a useful (but incomplete) implementation of Perl 6. More details about the features, milestones, and roadmap for this release will be forthcoming over the next few days. Pm P.S.: Several of our "down-under" community members have pointed out that "Spring 2010" can be a bit ambiguous. I'm using a season (instead of a month) to leave a month or two of wiggle room, but my intention is April 2010. As we get a bit more detail into the plan, we'll identify a specific month.

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moritz writes "On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm pleased to announce the June 2009 development release of Rakudo Perl #19 "Chicago". Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot Virtual Machine. The tarball for the July 2009 release is available from http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/downloads .

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Fritz Zaucker writes "There are still some free places in the courses on various Perl and none-Perl topics by Damian Conway held on August 20th to 27th 2009 from 9:00 to 17:00 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. Follow the link on the overview page to register."

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We are very excited to confirm that Dave Rolsky will be at IPW 2009! Dave Rolsky (autarch) is well known in the Perl community for his innumerable CPAN contributions: Moose, HTML::Mason, and DateTime to name a few (http://search.cpan.org/~drolsky/ for the rest), and for other projects (JSAN).

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Last night at OSCON, this year's White Camel Award winners were announced. The winners were: Tim BunceMichael SchwernPhilippe Bruhat (BooK)I hope you'll agree that they are three very deserving winners. The Perl community is lucky to have them. Congratulations to all the winners.

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cotto writes "On behalf of the Parrot team, I'm proud to announce Parrot 1.4.0 "Mundo Cani." Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all dynamic languages. Parrot 1.4.0 is available on Parrot's FTP site, or follow the download instructions. For those who would like to develop on Parrot, or help develop Parrot itself, we recommend using Subversion on our source code repository to get the latest and best Parrot code.

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