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Graham couldn’t make it, so only Aristotle and Philippe this week.

• We discussed the structure of the feature.pm documentation and how unfeatures should be covered. Philippe has provided a first patch which extends the description of each unfeature with a note stating from which feature bundle onward it is disabled.
• Relesae blocker triage continues. The meeting began without any unresolved blockers and ended the same way.
• Philippe plans to ship 5.42.0-RC1 as soon as the last missing perldelta entries are in.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Remember! Click Continue Reading to see all the text.

I am selling my villa unit and downsizing, probably in a month or so.
There may be a period when I am off-line.
In Australia villa unit means (usually) a stand-alone building in a small block of units.
I have 2-bedroom unit and am moving into a retirement (Yikes!) village to a 1-bedroom unit.
The are various reasons but one is this month I turned 75, much to my amazement and horror.
I still live independently, drive, have 2 miniature dogs, manage my own medicine, etc. So - all good ATM.
And yes, I am still programming. I more-or-less monthly release https://savage.net.au/misc/Perl.Wiki.html,
my curated compendium of Perl module, and I am slowly automating the creation of this wiki.
The next step will be to output the wiki as a jsTree (https://www.jstree.com/),
but moving - as you might know - consumes a lot of time.....

Quick refresher about Array and List in Perl.Please check out the link for more information: https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/array-vs-list

The Dancer Core Team is excitedly preparing a major release of Dancer2, 2.0.0. In advance of this, I'd like to give you all a preview of what to expect:

• A handful of bug fixes

• Customizable scrubber/censor engine (when dumping errors, etc. - a long requested feature)

• Remove Template::Tiny fork from core (Template::Tiny support remains, but ether graciously merged our customizations into Template::Tiny)

• Remove Dancer2::Template::Simple from the core of Dancer2

• New documentation, courtesy of a TPRF grant

• Removal of deprecated code (according to our deprecation policy)

• Official support for Perl 5.22 and newer

The following features are possible, but not likely for 2.0.0 (but maybe soon thereafter):

• Bring your own config engine (TOML, JSON, etc.)

• Using Throwable to produce errors

I'm estimating a release in the next 2-4 weeks. There are still a few bikesheds to paint, cats to herd, and yaks to shave.

If you have questions or feedback, we'd love to hear from you! Until then, keep Dancing, then Dance a little happier! :)

Jason/CromeDome

In the past, it took two years to merge my first PAUSE on Plack branch into the master and three years to merge the next PAUSE on Mojolicious (actually, two years to deploy and another year to merge). Now the question was: how long would it take to merge the next big thing, multifactor authentication for PAUSE? Two years, three years, or maybe four years this time? I already had a two-year-old draft branch and initially wished to merge it this year. However, things went differently.

All three of us attended.

• Release blocker triage yielded no new blockers. We followed up on the issues we were already tracking.
• The security release made some progress this week, but has been held up by the lack of a perldelta entry.

[P5P posting of this summary]

Here is the final post about AWS S3 Server Side Encryption where I demo encryption using Customer Key.Please check out the link for more information: https://theweeklychallenge.org/blog/aws-customer-key-encryption

With help from the community a development release of DBD::Oracle has been released to the CPAN.

This release includes a number of important changes that we hope will improve stability with threaded Perl.

If you are using DBD::Oracle I would ask that you try it out in your non-production environments initially and perhaps if you are confident there after, in your production environments.

The branch for it is here on github. I am personally grateful for people spending time and sending in pull requests , there is no monetary support for this driver although Oracle's open source community manager is actively engaged in discussions on issues and pull requests.

Github actions are configured on the repo and the quite thorough library of unit tests are run against Oracle XE on Ubuntu. This provides good signal but with extremely limited coverage of operating systems and database versions.

Due to the lack of variety in automated testing on Github - and the business critical nature of most Oracle databases - my recommendation is to mirror the Github repo in to your organization's repos and configure CI testing against your specific combination of Oracle versions, operating systems, and settings. The Github actions can be adapted to Gitlab reasonably quickly and give you a very high level of confidence before trialing new versions in production.

Over the past year, I’ve been self-studying XS and have now decided to share my learning journey through a series of blog posts. This tenth post introduces you to what I call closures in XS.

Datastar is a new-ish entry in the world of hypermedia-oriented ,htmx alternatives, with a distinct focus on Server-Sent Events. It describes itself thus:

Datastar brings the functionality provided by libraries like Alpine.js (frontend reactivity) and htmx (backend reactivity) together, into one cohesive solution. It's a lightweight, extensible framework that allows you to:

1. Manage state and build reactivity into your frontend using HTML attributes.
2. Modify the DOM and state by sending events from your backend.

I added Perl for Datastar with Datastar::SSE, for the backend reactivity bits.

Hi, you my have noticed our "ad" showing up on on metacpan.org - many thanks to David Cross for helping us out there! You may have to hit "refresh" a few times to see it (but not too many, please! xD)

Now, as much as we'd love to see everyone in Austin, TX on July 3-4, and it's sure to be a lot of fun, the PCC is a hybrid event, meaning we do permit remote attendees and worthy talks.

We already have many exciting and highly technical Perl talks. But we are selfish and we want more. It is okay if you even repeat a talk you've given elsewhere. We offer several levels of talks, including lightning talks, which we all know is how most of us got started. Do not be afraid! :-)

• https://www.meetup.com/austin-perl-mongers/events/305855419/
• https://www.papercall.io/perlcommunity
• https://www.papercall.io/cfps/6270/submissions/new

This post is adapted from my notes and recollection of the welcome speech I gave on the morning of Thursday May 1st, 2025, just before the initial stand-up.

This post is brought to you by Booking.com, the Diamond sponsor for the Perl Toolchain Summit 2025.

Booking.com is proud to sponsor the 2025 Perl Toolchain Summit as Perl continues to be a vital piece of our technology stack. We continue to rely on the Perl platform and tooling to serve millions of customers every day, helping them experience the world. Other than our interest in the evolution and modernization of the platform and tooling, the PTS is also a great opportunity to connect with the larger community and share learnings about how other companies and projects are tackling the challenges of working with Perl at scale (talking about both in systems and teams scalability), and how Perl fits an ever-changing and diverse technological landscape in other organizations.

You can learn more about Booking.com at the end of this article.

I was inspired by Daniel Stenberg's recent article Detecting malicious Unicode to write Test::MixedScripts, which tests Perl source code and other text files for unexpected Unicode scripts.

Why should you care about this?

There are Unicode characters in different scripts (alphabets) that look similar and are easily confused.

A malicious person could replace a domain name or other important token with one that looks correct, for is associated with a host or other resource that they control.

Consider the two domain names, "оnе.example.com" and "one.example.com". They look indistinguishable in many fonts, but the first one has Cyrillic letters.

Confusing Unicode might be added to your codebase through a malicious patch submission or pull request. Or it could be added as text from an email or web page that you copied and pasted into your code.

The module is easy to use, and defaults to testing for Latin and Common characters:

Returning from the 27th installment of the German Perl or Perl/Raku Workshop, this time in Munich, I'd like to share some impressions.

A week ago I attended the 2025 PTS. For me it was a different PTS than the previous ones.

Firstly because it was my first PTS without Abe Timmerman. He was a regular in both the PTS (as maintainer of Test::Smoke), and of the Amsterdam Perl Mongers. In fact the last time I saw him was on our flight back to Amsterdam after the PTS in Lisbon last year. He was greatly missed.

Secondly, because of a question that Book asked at the very beginning of the PTS: how often we had been to the PTS before. I was one of the few who had attended more than 10 of them. Combined with the fact that several other regular attendees couldn't make it that meant that this PTS I spent more time than ever on helping others with various issues.

This is a hybrid (in-person and virtual) conference being held in Austin, TX on July 3rd-4th.

Did you miss your chance to speak or have wish to speak at the only available Perl Science Track (and get published in the Science Perl Journal)? Or maybe you just can't get enough Perl this summer??? Submit here ... or get more information on the PCC, including registration, special event registration, and donation links click here. For questions you may email us at [email protected] or find us in the Perl Applications & Algorithms discord server.

The following lengths will be accepted for publication and presentation:

• Science Perl Track: Full length paper (10-36 pages, 50 minute speaker slot)
• Science Perl Track: Short paper (2-9 pages, 20 minute speaker slot)
• Science Perl Track: Extended Abstract (1 page, 5 minute lightning talk slot)
• Normal Perl Track (45 minute speaker slot, no paper required)

You may ask, where is the Winter SPJ or videos? We are working on them, promise! (it's a lot of work as some of you know. See also on Perlmonks and r/perlcommunity.

A Futility Closet post references a Perl "poem" over two decades old. I remember chuckling at it when it first appeared. Although it was published "anonymously", I'm pretty sure I know who wrote it. :)

This weekend I was once again privileged to attend the Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS). This year it was held in the lovely city of Leipzig.

The PTS continues to be my favourite technical event of the year. In part this is because I get to meet old friends and make new ones, but it's also because the summit really serves its purpose and I am able to make so much progress on the projects I have which belong in Perl's toolchain ecosystem.

PTS isn't a conference - it's a four-day working meeting. It brings together people working on toolchain projects to solve common problems and push the work forward. I did get a lot of work done, but that's not the main focus, for me anyway. I see it as a time to solve problems and plan the way forward, and for me PTS facilitates that in the most wonderful fashion.

Parenting aint easy. Certainly it is often something your kids teach you. Even worse, it often starts with ”<INSERT_KIDS_FRIENDS_NAME>’s dad lets him do <INSERT_CURRENTLY_PROHIBITED_ACTIVITY>”. In this constant battle to shape your offspring into a model citizen, with the values you value, and turning him/her into a self-sustaining organism, one applies tools that enhance particular features, remove the superfluous or the undesirable.