On the 13th and 14th of May I will be in Redmond, Washington at the 2 day kick off workshop for Microsoft-funded "Common Opensource Application Publishing Platform".
CoApp is an attempt to replicate something similar to Debian's dpkg/apt within the native Microsoft MSI installer, a single standard dependency and packaging system for install the large and complex dependency trees that exist in Open Source software.
While I don't have any official role in the project, I'll be providing advice wearing a mix of Perl toolchain, CPAN, Strawberry, OpenJSAN and CCAN hats.
I'm also hoping to firm up the fairly obvious idea of building a binary package repository for Strawberry Perl similar to ActiveState's PPM repository, except one which would be based on native MSI packages and would support the concept of cross-language dependencies into C library space (reliable installation of shared common libfoo.dll libraries are the initial primary target of the CoApp project).
Strawberry has never had this binary package repository primarily because it hasn't made a lot of sense to put in the enormous programming and computational effort when we can't actually provide anything better than ActiveState's system (it's better that we just leverage off it).
CoApp represents a new model for binary packages that has the potential to be significantly better than PPM, and so it's a much more interesting option to explore.
I'll also be in Framingham (near Boston) from the 17th to the 22nd of May at the Staples HQ (who are buying up the company I work at) doing some exploratory meetings to meet my counterparts in the US and look for interesting technology to steal and bring back to the Australian office.
Between and around these dates I should have some day trip and evening catchup opportunities with Perl folks. I'd also be quite happy to do any talks for local Perl monger groups if we can organise transport and a projector somewhere.
This trip is at short notice and my schedule is still firming up, but if you are interesting in doing something, mail me on my adamk@cpan address and let me know.
As MSI is greatly hampered by administrative restrictions (like disallowing installations into a custom directory, if at all), it would be great if you kept simple
