Hello Perlists and Zebras, Today was quite a big day for the module ecosystem, and as not everyone lives on the IRC I feel obliged to announce the changes to the wider world.
First of all, my fork of the ecosystem repo is now merged into perl6/ecosystem. What changes does it introduce? If you look closely, the modules list is now not a list of names and urls, but a list of urls to some json files. Those, called META.info are now the officia^Wmain, and modern way of publishing your module to a Perl 6 community. It has been around for a while now, but mostly as an experimental thing: now it becomes The Way To Publish Your Modules. Don't hide your excitement! Of course the http://modules.perl6.org website has been updated to use the META.list too. If you look closely, you will see that some of the modules have a nice-looking names now, like Foo::Bar rather than perl6-Foo-Bar. That's just a side effect of the new infrastructure. Worried that you haven't touched your project for ages, and it is no gone forever? No worries: every module which still haven't been updated to the new spec now lives in a so called SHELTER [1] - every sad module which doesn't yet have a META.info has been given one: for free! It's far from perfect, but keeps your module from being forgotten. Why should you care then? If the Proper Module Name doesn't seem attractive enough, look at modules.perl6.org again. See the badges? At the moment of writing this, there are probably three of them. But you may alredy notice four, or at least four slots. That's right, a new badge! Everyone who makes his/her module conformant to the new specs [2] will be awarded with a Cute Panda [3] badge. Panda as in panda, the module manager [4]. Panda badge means your module is panda-friendly, and everyone using it to install Perl 6 modules (I don't think there is any other way at the moment) will be able to fully experience and appreciate your work. Go for it! Please look through the new spec [2] and see how do you like it. It's pretty far from the previous philosophy (whatever you make module managers will install), but I believe the changes are for the better. If you disagree, or have some awesome idea, please contribute. Constructive criticism is very welcome. TL;DR: * There is a new spec for Perl 6 modules [2] * Make your module spec-compatibile to achieve fame, glory and cheezburgers Have an appropriate amount of fun! [1] https://github.com/perl6/ecosystem/tree/master/SHELTER [2] https://github.com/perl6/ecosystem/blob/master/spec.pod [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Panda_Cub_from_Wolong,_Sichuan,_China.JPG [4] https://github.com/tadzik/Pies -- Tadeusz Sośnierz