I’m very pleased to report that the last to-do item from my 2010Q1 Perl Foundation grant to improve Dist::Zilla is complete. That item was an improved dzil new command, described like this:

I think I’ve finished all the pages I meant to write for the Dist::Zilla Choose Your Own Tutorial. It covers a bunch of Dist::Zilla topics like creating a new dist, converting an existing one, and adding new behavior to your configuration. The “choose your own” format should make it easy to add new content, like a wiki, but I like the almost-linear feel of the format.

This weekend, David Golden and I holed up in the Pobox offices and worked on the final draft for v2 of the CPAN Meta specification. It’s the document that describes what goes in META.yml – or, now, META.json. This was not very exciting to many people, but we were both really excited to get it done, and hopefully the final v2 spec and support libraries will be out in a few days.

I spend a lot of time dealing with character encoding issues. Getting them just right is important and sometimes tricky, but getting them wrong makes you look like an amateur. This paragraph from a blog post about PHP and encoding made me smile.

Trial Releases

I thought I’d have to wait another week or two to feel good about the next major (slightly backwards incompatible) release of Dist::Zilla. It looks like I should be able to release it this week.

I’m feeling pretty good about progress so far, especially after today taking an axe to the InstallDirs plugin, which was a bug ugly mess. Here’s the big board:

I don’t think I’m quite done with my basic tests, but I’ve gotten to the point where I need to fix some other features first. The yak stack is actually sort of interesting, so I’ll explain it:

I’ve added a bunch more tests to Dist::Zilla as I try to work through my checklist of plugins to cover. Some have been easier than I expected, but I’ve found myself in a bit of a predicament.

“Hey, look, I wrote some more unit tests!” is about as fun to report as it is to do, but so far, so good. The Dist::Zilla::Tester system I put together has been working pretty well, and I’ve made a few tweaks as I go. I’d originally meant to write one test per plugin, but for some of them it’s just much, much simpler to combine them to have two or three plugins per test file. If this leads to problems, I can split it up again later. For now, it’s looking good.