Email, indexing, and error reporting

In past years, one of my big areas of work at PTS has been PAUSE. If you’re not a CPAN wonk, here’s a tiny explainer: PAUSE is the Perl Author Upload SErver. It’s where you go to upload new software to the CPAN, and to manage the permissions on packages for which you’re the administrator. It’s got a number of interrelated pieces, but the two easiest units to describe are the web interface and the indexer.

Ten years ago, the “toolchain gang” who manage the libraries most central to deploying and testing CPAN libraries came to an agreement on the minimum supported version of perl. Nobody needed to keep maintaining v5.6, and everyone who hadn’t already, moved to v5.8. That was ten years ago, but the toolchain was still pinned to v5.8. I am not enthusiastic about targeting v5.8, and have written about this before. I bumped some modules to v5.12, earlier this year. I got some feedback, both positive and negative, but I felt good about it.

It’s been three years since the last Perl Toolchain Summit. In 2019, I wasn’t sure whether I would go. This time, I was sure that I would. It had been too long since I saw everyone, and there were some useful discussions to be had. I think that overall the summit was a success, and I’m happy with the outcomes. We left with a few loose threads, but I’m feeling hopeful that they can, mostly, get tied up.

I ignored Mastodon for a long time, but eventually I had to stop. Now that I stopped ignoring it and started using it, I feel like I’m either going to lose interest or (ugh) get involved.

I made two recent posts about writing code to connect software and connect hardware to Philips Hue lights. I thought I was done, except maybe for something really straightforward: making a tiny web service for the lights. Here I am, though, making a (quick) third post.

Okay, so last time, I wrote about connecting to my lights. This time, I’m going to write about what I actually did to put my code to use. It’s all well and good to have a working library to control the lights, but I was going to need a way to actually cause useful network calls to be made.

Last time, I posted about goofing around with little LED lights. This time, I’m posting about goofing around with larger LED lights. Specifically, Philips Hue lights.

I decided, today, to spend thirty minutes trying to get my little blinking LED working again. Now, six hours later, I am ready to tell you about it.

On New Year’s Eve, I posted that I’d uploaded 114 updated distributions to the CPAN. Many of those, in addition to updating distribution metadata, made some changes to the version of perl they require, or say they may require in the future. I mentioned that in my last post. I was adding text something like this: