The O'Reilly Open Source Conferences have begin in Monterey, with about 1700 people preregistered. The first two days, Saturday and Sunday, were filled with socializing, BOFs, tutorials, and general meetings of minds on various topics.
There was a get-together for perl5-porters members on Sunday, with lots of cool topics discussed. Much of the discussion involved the future of perl development with threads, IO, maintaining different types of builds and compatibility between them, 64-bit integers, documentation, etc. Kurt Starsinic announced an ambitious, and very cool and almost-ready, project hosted at labs.perl.org which is a machine that will test, on various platforms, different types of perl builds. So when a new version of perl comes out, it will send requests to other machines to build perl with different flags and run benchmarks and tests and report back to perl5-porters. Eventually, labs.perl.org will be available for testing of perl modules, and will test things on request from trusted users. Way cool.
