My activities during Perl/QA hackathon in Paris

Hello

Last week-end, I’ve participated Perl/QA hackathon in Paris.

Here’s a short summary of the main activities during this week-end. I was not in the best of shape due to a nasty (biological) bug that wore me down before the hackathon.

First of all, I discussed with rjbs about the bunch of debian patches I’ve written for Software::License. These patches (and hacks) are used in Debian to provide licenses summaries in Debian::Dpkg::Copyright model to help write Debian copyright files. License management is boring but necessary. cme and Software::License help in making this task slightly less boring. Ricardo kindly suggested some modifications and agreed to include my patches. I implemented these modifications directly during the hackathon.

The other tasks during this week-end were (not necessarily in that order):

• I discussed with alanhaggai and gave him some ideas to fix his Archive::Zip module
• I did a live demo of Debian packaging to ribasushi: I updated the Debian package libdbix-class-schema-loader-perl from CPAN and uploaded it in Debian.
• I presented how to package Perl modules for Debian. renormalist will package his own module Data::Dpath and its dependencies for Debian. I will sponsor his packages once they are available on Debian perl’s team git repository. Unless gregoa beats me to it 🙂
• I discussed with Slaven Rezic some binding weirdness found in Perl/Tk HList. Config::Model’s graphical interface provide a viewer widget and and editor widget for configuration items. As expected, the viewer is invoked by a single left click. One would expect a double click to invoke the editor widget. But the double click bindinngdoes not owrk in HList when the single click is used. Currently the editor widget is invoked with a right-click, which is not user-friendly. According to Slaven, the bug might be hidden quite deep in Perl/Tk guts. Fixing it won’t be easy.
• As a Debian/sid user, I’ve been quite spoiled: I’ve always had a recent Perl available on my system. I’ve neved had to compile Perl since my HPUX days back in last century. However, Config;:Model tests failed with Perl 5.15.9, a development version not available in Debian (sid is not that unstable). Thanks to Xavier Caron, I’ve learned about perlbrew and cpanminus to reproduce this bug and fix the issue. Many apologies to miyagawa for asking dumb questions about cpanm: the disctinction between runtime and build time does not apply to cpan minus. I guess that’s the drawback of wearing 2 hats (Debian dev hat and Perl dev hat): your brain may get confused and you conflate issues. Oops.

Many thanks to FreeSide who sponsored my travel, to the hackathons organisers and to all the participants for their welcome.

All the best