Author: Yanick Champoux

Do you regularly scuba dive in a motley sea of other peeps’ codebase, trying to bring on surgical changes without doing too much collateral b0rking on the code formatting? If so, Steffen Mueller has a nifty trick to share with you. Using Text::FindIndent, he shows how to configure Vim such that it can magically adapts to any indentation policy.

I already knew about git-achievements, but earlier this week I was showen Unit Testing Achievements. My first thought after seeing it was: “cool, I want to port that to Smolder!”. My second thought was: “hey, if we can do it for Git, and for testing, why not for Perl itself?” Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to harness its power for a little bit of fun? Indeed, it wasn’t…Have a look!

This blog entry is based on true events. Only the pattern has been modified to protected the innocent.

In a turn of events so monumental that it can only possibly be a sign that Ragnarok is nigh upon us, an early adopter implementation of Perl 6 has been released. The number of blog entries that it generated is, as one might expect, quite massive. But most important is, the downloads — both for Unix and Windows — are available on Github. Don’t lose any time! Go, download, compile, and get a taste of what the new kid on the block has to offer.

The first non-development version of XML::XSS has been released on CPAN. The big delta since the last blog entry (XPathScript Reborn) is the re-introduction of templates, and a generous slathering of overloaded shortcuts for stylesheet definitions.

First this week we have John Anderson filling us up on the Perl high drama of OSCON of earlier this week. In a nutshell the organizers provided, as it’s the tradition, ribbons to the attendees, and the Perl Mongers in the crowd got one reading Desperate Perl Hacker. The epithet, coined in an XML article written in 1997, was meant in good fun, but was received with a distinct lack of glee by the Perl hackers.

Following up on my threat of last week, I released Test::Wrapper on CPAN. If you read my previous blog entry, you know that one of the big gotchas of the wrapping gymnastics I was doing was that it was utterly #@$%$# up Test::Builder’s internal states. Thus, at that point, it was either run TAP tests, or use Test::Wrapper, but don’t do both at the same time. Not the most God-awful limitation ever, perhaps, but still not very cool. Since then, I’ve taken a second look at the problem, and realized that this limitation can not only be overcome, but in a surprisingly easy manner.

I was happily minding my business today, until I got sight of Tim’s tweet bemoaning the fact that Test::Difference tests can’t easily be used outside of a test harness. Darn him, that’s exactly the kind of happy little puzzle I can’t resist. So I began to think about it. Of course, the Right Solution is probably to add alternative non-TAP-tied functions to the test modules themselves. But what if you just want to quickly leverage the module’s functionality without having to re-arrange its innards? Well, most test modules use Test::Builder, so there’s surely ways to twist that to our advantage. After a hour or two of hacking, I think I got one.

If you are, you might like the little greasemonkey script (available on userscript.org and github) that I churned. The script finds the AUTHORS/CONTRIBUTORS section of POD pages on https://search.cpan.org and add Gravatar pictures where it finds author email addresses. The picture on the right is an example of what it does to the main Catalyst CONTRIBUTORS section.

Inspired, but not completely satisfied with Camelia, the Perl 6 mascot, Sebastian Riedel came up with a new set of butterfly logos for the Perl 5/6 family. Very purty, methinks, very purty indeed.