I guess I'm not much of a journal writer. But I read of lot of the others and occasionally feel the urge to babble away.
So what's up? Work kept me busy for a while so I didn't touch Alzabo until last weekend. Finally got out another version with lots of new goodies, many of which are thanks to Ilya Martynov, who has submitted lots of cool patches.
One of the neatest bits is that you can now create "potential rows". These are objects that have basically the same API as a row object but which aren't actually in the database. This can be really useful for some UI's where you want to use the same forms for inserts and updates. Anyway, you simple create such a row, update it, and then call $row->make_live, which magically transforms the reference in $row into a real row object. Neat.
Recently I got a few patches accepted into the Perl core (just cleaning up old library code). The ExtUtils::* modules are really crufty. I mean, we're talking serious cruft. I'm trying to modernize little bits and pieces of them.
I haven't done much on the Mason core recently. We really need to ramp up and get 1.10 out before we finish the book so the tech reviewers have something to play with!
And speaking of the book, I'm very behind. Ken is lucky (well, define lucky) cause he has no job so he has lots of time to work on the book and other geeky projects. I have a 80% time job so I've got other stuff to do. Hopefully I'll whip out a few chapters over the holiday and then we'll be damn close to a tech review draft. That'll be good.
BTW, if you're _really_ interested in tech reviewing let me know. You should know the current release of Mason pretty well and be willing to play with the next version when it comes out.
And back to Ken, his cool ExtUtils::MakeMaker replacement is coming along. I sent him a number of patches to implement things like distdir and disttest and other actions. Plus, it now has a sweet prereq system where you can do this:
prereq => { Foo::Bar => '>= 1.24, != 1.251, != 1.44, <= 2.1' }
I don't know about you, but I've often wanted something like that in order to avoid known buggy versions of modules. Of course, the simpler
prereq => { Foo::Bar => 1.24 }
works just fine too.
It'd be really neat to somehow make CPAN.pm respect this and download a version that matched. Of course, this could lead to downgrading an existing install so it'll need appropriate warnings.
It'll really nice to have Perl 6, which should support multiple versions of modules installed.
The next step is to make a bootstrapping Makefile.PL that the current CPAN.pm will find that will somehow let pass through everything to Build.PL (Module::Build's Makefile.PL equivalent).
I also have a preliminary patch to CPAN.pm which will make it recognize Module::Build. Hopefully, Andreas will like the idea.
Looking forward to going to a friend's house for a vegan potluck tomorrow. Traditionally, there's been lots of good dessert. Last year there were multiple types of pie, cookies, and homemade strawberry vegan "ice cream" (actually made with soy). So good. I'm feeling hungry just thinking about it. Of course, I was hungry before I wrote that paragraph too.
I'd like to eat but I'm waiting for people here to get out a damn meeting first (and then I can go home for the day, I hope).
waiting, waiting, waiting ....
