the 2013 Perl QA Hackathon in Lancaster
I got home from Lancaster, this morning. I’d been there for the sixth annual Perl QA Hackathon. As usual, it was a success and made me feel pretty productive. Here’s an account of most of the things I did:
Meetings!
There were many discussant-hours spent in room C-7C hashing out a bunch of things that needed hashing out. Although I was very interested in the outcome, and had some strong opinions about one or two things, I didn’t want to get too tangled up in the discussion, so I split my attention between (mostly) coding and (a little) joining in. Others will surely write up the decisions of these meetings, so I won’t, but in the end I felt that it was useful for me to be there and that I wasn’t unhappy with any of the resolutions.
PAUSE!
At my first two QA Hackathons, I worked mostly on the CPAN Testers Metabase.
Since then, my most common recurring project has been PAUSE. More
specifically, I’ve mostly worked on the indexer. That’s the program that looks
at new files to decide whether it should put their contents into the
02packages file used by CPAN clients to install packages by name. It’s a
really important program, and I remain very interested in improving its
maintainability. Once again, though, I wasn’t just adding tests, but also
doing some tweaks to how the PAUSE indexer works.
A few months ago at the NY Perl
Hackathon,
David Golden and I got to work fixing letter case behavior in PAUSE. The
problem was that PAUSE treated package permissions case-insensitively even
though not all supported Perl platforms would. The most commonly discussed
problem was the conflict between File::stat, a core module, and File::Stat,
a non-core module. If a user ran cpan File::Stat on Win32, he or she would
end up with File/Stat.pm installed, and use File::stat would pick that up
instead of the core module.
We’d done about three quarters of the work for this in New York, but I didn’t send a pull request. I knew that we had an untested case: what happens when someone who owns Foo::Bar now uploads Foo::bar? We decided that it would replace the old entry. I wrote tests, which showed it didn’t work, then David made it work. We also wrote a few more tests for other edge cases, and were pleased to find them all handled the way we wanted.
We also discussed problems with the non-uniqueness of distribution names on
the CPAN. In short, non-maintainer of Text::Soundex should not be able to
upload a dist called Text-Soundex and have it indexed. I implemented this,
which ended up being a bit tricker to do than I expected, although the code
changes weren’t too bad. It was just getting there that took time.
Unfortunately, over 1,000 distributions on the CPAN have names that don’t match
a contained package, so those had to be grandfathered in. I may send out a
“consider changing your dist name” email, but I haven’t decided. It isn’t
really such a big deal, but it nags at me.
I also did some work on the code that generates 03modlist.data, the
registered module list. The future of this feature is unclear, and will have
to get sorted out soon, probably over the next month or two.
Pod!
The thing I came to the hackathon knowing that I had to work on was Pod::Checker. In fact, most of the PAUSE work I did had to wait until I finished dealing with Pod::Checker. I was really not looking forward to the work, but I didn’t want it to continue to languish, undone. I’m glad I started with it, because it only took about a day, and finishing it made me feel excited for the rest of my time: I’d be able to work on other things!
In 2011, there was a Perl project in the Google Summer of Code whose goal was to replace all core uses of Pod::Parser with Pod::Simple. Pod::Html was overhauled, but Pod::Usage and Pod::Checker weren’t completed. Pod::Checker was mostly done, but not quite, and unfortunately languished in that state for some time. Since I’m keen to get Pod::Parser out of the core distribution, and since I know that nobody really wants to do this work, I decided it would be a good task to force myself to do while stuck in a room with nothing but my laptop and a bunch of sympathetic ears.
There were n kinds of Pod::Checker checks that needed to be implemented, reimplemented, or moved to Pod::Simple itself:
- tests needed updating for the new mismatched =item type check from Pod::Simple
- the totally broken “unescaped <” warning had to go
- a warning for “no closing =back” got put into Pod::Simple, eliminating use of Pod-Parser’s Pod::List
- warnings for ambiguous constructs in
L<>like leading spaces, unquoted slashes, and so on - the check for internal hyperlink resolution had to be reimplemented
…and a few other little things, like hash randomization bugs. I’ve filed a pull request with Pod-Simple for the patches that would go there, and my branch of Pod-Checker based on Marc Green’s original work is also now on GitHub, waiting to get a trial release.
Once this is done, we’ll get Pod::Usage converted, then we’re done with everything but the actual warnings and subsequent removals!
Other Stuff!
I made a new release of
CPAN::Mini,
closing quite a few very old tickets. I also went ahead and made --remote
optional. Maybe in the future, I might make --local optional, too! The
biggest outstanding question is whether I will add any alternate configuration
filename and location for Win32, rather than ~/.minicpanrc. I’m still
conflicted.
I applied some patches to Router::Dumb, exposing (I think) an annoying missing behavior in Test::Deep. I’d like to figure out how to fix that Test::Deep problem soon, but it didn’t happen this weekend.
I made a few other releases, including a release to Dist::Zilla that will make it always upload to PAUSE using HTTPS. I decided not to try to tackle anything bigger at the hackathon.
Free-Floating Helping!
This year, I think I spent less time than ever looking at other people’s code to be a fresh set of eyes. On the other hand, I spent more time answering questions related to coordinating changes with blead and other future releases. “Is this a blocker?” was asked quite a few times as the rest of the room found some interesting bugs in bleadperl. “Shall I commit this to 5.19.0?” came up often, too.
The End!
I’m hoping to get some more work done on the Pod and PAUSE fronts, hopefully very soon, but maybe at YAPC. I’m looking forward to seeing the fruits of all the labors performed by the other hackers at the hackathon, too. (I started, here, to list “especially abc, xyz, …” but the list got far too long. Lots of good stuff is coming!) I also clearly found plenty of things I’d like to do, but not just yet. In other words, I’m ready for next year already!
I might write up some of the social bits of the trip a bit later. The short version of that is that I had a great time, enjoyed seeing old friends and making some new ones, and ate four servings of black pudding.