For the impatient, here is a summary:

• Test2 is going to be part of the Test-Simple dist. It will not be a standalone dist.
• The next stable Test-Simple release will include Test2 and a Test::Builder that runs on Test2.
• The release date for the next stable Test-Simple, which includes Test2, will be no sooner than Friday May 6'th, which is our planned release date.

The QAH discussion focused around a single question: "What is the best path forward for Test::Builder when we consider both end-users and test tool authors?"

Happy Earth Day 2016!

Fortuitiously, Earth Day this year falls during the QA Hackathon in Rugby, UK. Earth Day is a great time to clean up old distributions in one's CPAN directory, to save storage space on the countless CPAN mirrors and generally reduce clutter. To do this, I run my cleanup script, available here.

Part of my motivation for the virtual spring cleaning is that I have many slow-cooking pet projects in which I try out new modules or features that have not yet passed the test of time, at least at the moment of creation. Usually, I only work on these projects when I have both, inspiration and downtime, usually right after Perl workshops. One example of such a project is a prototype of a rogue-like game named App::StarTraders (unpublished) which is intended to become a clone of Elite.

Announce: Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, Release #98 (2016.04)

On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I'm very happy to announce the
April 2016 release of Rakudo Perl 6 #98. Rakudo is an implementation of
Perl 6 on the Moar Virtual Machine[^1].

This release implements the 6.c version of the Perl 6 specifications.
It includes bugfixes and optimizations on top of
the 2015.12 release of Rakudo, but no new features.

Upcoming releases in 2016 will include new functionality that is not
part of the 6.c specification, available with a lexically scoped
pragma. Our goal is to insure that anything that is tested as part of the
6.c specification will continue to work unchanged. There may be incremental
spec releases this year as well.

The tarball for this release is available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/rakudo/.

Please note: This announcement is not for the Rakudo Star
distribution[^2] --- it's announcing a new release of the compiler
only. For the latest Rakudo Star release, see
http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

We're delighted to announce that CV-Library is supporting the QA Hackthon for the first time, as a gold sponsor.

CV-Library is the UK's leading independent job site, attracting over 3.8 million unique job hunters every month and holding the nation's largest database of over 10 million CVs.

I have been working on a new release of Net::SSH2 that has undergone mayor, mostly internal, changes.

There are not too many new features. The aim has been to simplify the code, made it reliable and improve the overall consistency and behavior of the module.

Most important changes are as follows:

• Typemaps are used systematically to convert between Perl and C types:

  In previous versions of the library, inputs and specially output values were frequently handled by custom code with every method doing similar things in slightly different ways.

  Now, most of that code has been replaced by typemaps, resulting on a consistent and much saner handling of input and output values.

• Only data in the 'latin1' range is now accepted by Net::SSH2 methods. Previous versions would just get Perl internal representation of the passed data without considering its encoding and push it through libssh2.

That caused erratic behavior, as that encoding depends on the kind of data, but also on its history and even latin1 data is commonly encoded internally as utf8.

I want to write about subroutine signatures more.

This is previous topic.

I think subroutine signatures don't need arguments count checking

Current subroutine signatures contains tow difference features

1. Syntax suger of my ($x, $y) = @_
2. Arguments count checking

My opinion is that this two features has different purpose. First is for syntax sugar. Second is for aruments count checking.
I think it is good to separate two features because each feature has different purpose.

I don't hope "perl subroutine + (syntax suger + argument count checking)".

I hope "perl subroutine + syntax sugar + argument count checking".

It is not good that different purpose features is mixed into one feature.

I want syntax sugar and I don't need argument count checking in my program. This is natural for me.
but there are people who want also argument count checking.

We should not assume all people want arumengt count checking.

Syntax sugar is the feature most poeple wait, but argument count checking is not.

It is safe implementaion in the Perl future that any perfomance cost don't force to user

Hey everyone,

Following is the p5p (Perl 5 Porters) mailing list summary for April 5th week. Enjoy!