On Fri, Dec 15, 2000 at 02:05:45PM -0500, Andy Dougherty wrote: > On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Daniel Stutz wrote: > > > By the way: its very hard to find infomation about P5P. > > It is one of the very first entries in the FAQ, which should be included > in every distribution of perl. Also note: sending mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] would have got you the answer to the original question, plus more information than you ever needed to know about p5p. I promise to start sending it out regularly again. Honest. Here's your starter for ten. 1) Administration 1.1) Help! How do I unsubscribe? Send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, and await a response. Once you reply to the response, you'll be unsubscribed. If that doesn't work, find your subscription address - it'll be in the Return-Path header of any mails from p5p to you. If that's [EMAIL PROTECTED], send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. 1.2) I'm not subscribed - how do I subscribe? Send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. To specify [EMAIL PROTECTED] as your subscription address, send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. 1.3) How do I retrieve old messages? Every message you get from perl5-porters will have an autogenerated >>From line. For instance: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The number in the middle, 5523, is the sequence number. To get the message with a particular sequence number mailed to you, send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. To a range of messages mailed to you in a digest, for instance, the messages with sequence numbers from 4902 to 4950, send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. You may request a maximum of 100 messages in a single digest. 1.4) Is there a web archive? Yes, there is, and it's at http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/ 1.5) perl5-porters is too big! Is there a digest? Funny you should mention that. Mark-Jason Dominus compiles a weekly summary of the highlights, with links to the archive where more extensive reading is recommended. These can be found at http://www.perl.com/pub/q/archivep5p If you want to receive all the messages but batched into a single mail per day, you can subscribe to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> instead; send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. Be warned that replying to messages from the digest may end up messing up threading on things like the web archive - at least set your outgoing Subject header to the subject of the individual message you're replying to. 1.6) How do I get this document? Uh, you're reading it, aren't you? Oh well, life is strange. Send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> and you'll receive a copy. 1.7) How do I submit/suggest questions for this FAQ? Send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. This will reach the FAQ maintainer who is currently Simon Cozens. The FAQ was last updated Thu Jun 29 2000 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 2) Questions about perl5-porters itself 2.1) What is perl5-porters for? perl5-porters is, briefly, for all topics related to the development of the Perl language and the perl interpreter. It's for reporting and fixing bugs, working towards the next version of perl, and improving the quality of the Perl language. 2.2) What is perl5-porters not for? * Questions about programming Perl. * Questions covered in the Perl FAQ. * Spam. 2.3) Are there any rules? No. However, the list is refereed, primarily in order to prevent empassioned debate degenerating into flame war. The refereeing system is explained below. Larry's advice from perlstyle apply just as well here as it does to Perl programming: * Be consistent. * Be nice. The established medium for messages is plain text. If your email client wants to send things in HTML, please try and discipline it. 2.4) What is the refereeing system? Sarathy explains: * There will be a panel of referees. * The panel monitors both threads and personalities. * Messages from subscribers normally go through immediately. * Messages from non-subscribers are normally subject to moderation, except perhaps messages sent via perlbug. (This is meant to catch spam and usage questions.) * Referees normally work behind-the-scenes. They will privately remind people to avoid flogging dead equines, provocative language, off-topic conversations etc. * A simple majority among the referees can choose to moderate/unmoderate threads/personalities. (The moderation state is sticky--once enabled, it stays that way, until it is disabled.) * Moderated messages are only posted after approval by the referees. If not approved, they are dropped with a polite notification to sender on the reason(s). And note we say "referees", not "moderators". This is a deliberate comment on their role - Sarathy again: Referees aren't there to impede or even regulate the play--they're there to ensure smooth conduct of it. Benching a player would be the last resort. The way I see it, a referee is just a voice of reason with some recognized authority, so that they may put their foot down if it comes down to it. (That shouldn't happen until things get ugly, which I hope they seldom do.) For a list of the current referees, see question 4.2 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 3) Development questions 3.1) How do I report a bug? First, are you sure it's a bug in Perl itself, not just a bug in your code? Take the problem out of the context of your current program and write a short test program to reproduce it - as short as you possibly can. It's far easily to clearly detect a Perl bug if it's demonstrated in 5 lines of code, rather than buried somewhere in the middle of a 500-line program. Next, do we already know about it? Check with the bug ticketing system at http://bugs.perl.org/ It's always worth getting someone else to look it over and confirm that this really is a Perl bug, not just a thinko. If there's nobody around to do that, consider asking on the comp.lang.perl.misc or comp.lang.perl.moderated newsgroups. Now, if you've really got a bug, type "perlbug" at your prompt, and follow the instructions. It really helps us if you provide: your demonstration code, what you got, what you think you should have got, and the relevant part of the Perl documentation that makes you think that. 3.2) I want to get involved! What can I do? Follow the list for a few weeks or months to get an idea of what goes on, and see if anything pops up that you're interested in. Occasionally someone will request a fix, and that's your chance! If there doesn't appear to be anything you want to or are able to do, have a look in your Perl source kit: you'll find the files Todo and Todo-5.6 - some of the items there are being worked on, so check back-issues of p5p. Furthermore, you don't need to be an expert programmer: *anyone* can help with proof-reading, correcting and expanding the documentation, for instance. There's certainly a place for anyone who truly wants to get involved, and over time, you'll find it. You should also read perlhack.pod, Porting/pumpkin.pod and Porting/patching.pod - these will tell you how to create and submit patches, as well as some more philosophical issues involved in patching Perl. To summarise: * diff -ruN perl-current perl-patched > patch and append that verbatim, preferably not as an attachment, to your post. * Drastic changes to the syntax and/or operation of Perl are going to be viewed with a lot of suspicion. Start small. * Patches speak louder than words. Having ideas is good, but taking the time to implement them will improve their credibility. * At least one person will think your patch sucks. It's better to let the code stand on its own merits than get into arguments. 3.3) I've created a patch, but I'd like someone to check it over before I post it to the list. What should I do? The first thing you should do is relax! We don't bite, and we appreciate people who want to help. Just go for it. However, if you're still worried about whether you should send the patch, email the relevant pumpking for the area you're patching, or one of the referees. 3.4) Is Perl in CVS? Perl isn't available by anonymous CVS. Perl is, however, kept under development control - it's using a Perforce server which is currently hosted for us at ActiveState. Some pumpkings have write access to this server. There is no public read access to this server - see 3.6 below. 3.5) What is the APC? When a change is made on the Perforce server, a patch is generated and placed in the Archive of Perl Changes. This is located at ftp://ftp.linux.activestate.com/pub/staff/gsar/APC/ The directory diffs/ contains patches against the latest release. 3.6) What is perl-current? There's also a directory called "perl-current" in the APC, which contains the very latest Perforce snapshot of Perl. This is the closest it gets to an anonymous CVS, and this snapshot is what, ideally, you should patch against. Since downloading the whole thing from FTP is wasteful, you can either keep yourself up-to-date using the diffs as mentioned above, or you can use rsync - the following command will update the directory "bleadperl" on your computer to match perl-current: rsync -auvz rsync://ftp.linux.activestate.com/perl-current/ bleadperl/ 3.7) What is cfgperl? bleadperl? The mainline? The repository of the Perl Perforce server is laid out something like this: /----+-----perl +-----cfgperl +-----vmsperl +-----maint-5.004------perl +-----maint-5.005------perl +-----maint-5.6------perl Each "branch" contains an independent version of Perl, but Perforce knows how to integrate patches between them. The current development version of perl, otherwise known as bleadperl, lives in the mainline, /perl. The Configure pumpkin keeps his own development version, at /cfgperl; this may be used to fix Configure-related problems, or pick up development patches from p5p - or whatever else the Configure pumpkin wants to do with it. vmsperl is there to fix VMS things, and the other branches are the maintainance tracks for the named version. See Porting/perlforce.pod in your perl distribution for more details. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Who's Who 4.1) What's a pumpking? You didn't read Porting/pumpkin.pod, did you? :) A pumpking is the person who holds the patch pumpkin, the responsibility for co-ordinating patches on a specific area. You can find a (slightly coded) list of the current pumpkings at the end of AUTHORS in your Perl source kit - this maps people to areas, and MAINTAIN maps both people and areas to files in the kit. 4.2) What's *the* pumpking? *The* pumpking is the person who holds the patch pumpkin for Perl itself, what other projects call the "release engineer". Currently, that's Jarkko Heitanemiani. 4.2) Who are the referees? Nathan Torkington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Chip Salzenberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Mark-Jason Dominus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Damian Conway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kurt Starsinic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> They have their own mailing list, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, but only referees may subscribe to that. If you have any issues with the refereeing process, please try to sort it out with individual referees first, and use the list as a last resort. -- The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements. -Kernighan, 1978
