current project status braindump
Lately, I have a lot going on. I think I need to recalibrate my “very busy” alert, because I feel like it’s been going off for months, now. Still, things are okay. Here’s a bit of a dump on some things I’m working on or should be working on.
Data::GUID
I’m definitely behind schedule on getting Data::GUID refactored to allow different generators and objects, which will allow a pure-perl backend (currently UUID::Generator::PurePerl) when XS isn’t available. This is mostly done work, but it needs testing, polish, and some design thinking.
Email::MIME::Kit
I’m really not happy with the way the standard Assembler class works. It does
too much and is too hard to extend without reading its source. I need to
refactor it, document how it works, and maybe break it into a few pieces. So
far, I’ve avoided this by writing all my extensions as around method
modifiers. This has been quite effective, actually.
META.json
I started to do some work on PAUSE to get it to respect META.json, but I need to work on getting some things integrated, and other things coded and committed. Once that’s done, the indexer will be able to index based on META.json, which is huge. Next up will be CPAN.pm and CPANPLUS.pm, which I hope will not be to hard to work with. Once those parts of the toolchain can all consume META.json, I can start working on getting my hacks to emit META.json into all the dist building tools – preferably after making them not be hacks.
At some point in all this, we’ll get to “make JSON.pm part of core perl5.”
Other Email Stuff
I really need to fix Email::Valid’s tests to skip the DNS tests when coping
with obnoxious ISPs that provide “helpful” lies to DNS resolvers.
will-never-exist.pobox.com does not exist, and if there’s an A record for
it, then the DNS resolver is lying. (Of course, this also means that anyone
using the “domain part must have A or MX record” rule is going to have false
positives on validity checks.)
Honestly, I can’t think of any more irritating change in basic ISP policies in the last few years.
There are some other bugs with Email::Valid, too, regarding how it uses
Mail::Address. I’m pondering writing a new Email::Valid that does all the same
stuff, a little better, and with a less unusual interface. It would be nice to
be able to easily subclass it to add more checks, like is_address_in_use or
contains_forbidden_characters for application-specific use.
Heck, maybe I can use Classifier for this, since the new bounce parser is still on the back burner, four years later.
Pod::Weaver and Friends
Basically, I’ve decided I don’t have the time to think about them this week. This is disappointing, but I’d rather put it off a week than make bad decisions because I’m brain-fried.
OSCON starts next week, and I’m hoping to have plenty of down time to work on ideas and implementations. OSCON is generally, for me, much lower-stress than YAPC. I think I will get a lot of hacking done, and if I don’t, I will get a lot of flowcharting done, and for me that’s half the battle.
Finally…
I’ve also been thinking a lot about structured data storage, ultra-easy git helpers for small companies, portable testing, pluggable testing, and Rx. I keep improving our little git scripts to keep track of our internal git repos, and I think at some point I might have something I can describe as a reproduceable ecosystem. Rx really needs me to finish the structured failures branch, which will be phenomenally useful. A lot of that work will be related to the testing stuff I’m thinking about. (I would love to write up a comprehensive appraisal of Ingy’s TestML, which I talked to him about quite a bit during his development of it.) The structured wiki stuff is largely about my desire to use something better than Obsidian Portal for my D&D game. I should probably write up both what I want and why I don’t care much for Obsidian Portal!
For now, this has just been an exercise in collecting my own thoughts. Maybe tonight or tomorrow I’ll actually do a little work on some code. Then again, maybe I’ll do some yard work instead.