Well, it's been a long week, but almost all the tests for MacPerl 5.8 -- thanks in large part to Jarkko Hietaniemi, Michael Schwern, Thomas Wegner, my three Heroes of Perl for the past two years -- are working now, including all of ext/ and lib/. ExtUtils tests are mostly failing (but can and will be ported) and there's a problem with Time::HiRes that I didn't get a chance to track down; but aside from a few long-standing bugs in MacPerl ($? values being useless, and a few other smaller problems), it's all set.
So this weekend I hope to get a release of MacPerl 5.8.0a1 out, on the heels of the 5.8.0 RC 1 forthcoming from Jarkko. This is an exciting time; perl 5.8 is really shaping up to be an excellent release -- perhaps the best .0 release in perl 5's history -- and it's the first perl release to have full support for MacPerl, as well as the first to have full support for Mac OS X (5.6.1 has support for Mac OS X, though there are a few problems with it).
So why are these men my heroes? Jarkko for his work on perl 5.8 in general, but specifically for the care he gives to "little" things other people might not care about, such as MacPerl support, and the manner in which he puts patches into the core (patch first, fix later (as long as the patch seems like a good idea)) which in my opinion really pushed things forward. He encourages people to participate in many subtle ways, and it's a good thing.
Schwern is my hero because of the extensive and good work he puts in on various projects, like MakeMaker, but especially the test suite.
Thomas is my hero because his help to me in porting MacPerl is invaluable. MacPerl would not be nearly as far along without his help.
and to think until he came to Boston he had never considered the Mac laptop as an option. I had to gently coerce him for 3 months before he broke down and bought a mac laptop
