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:

Today, I uploaded 114 new versions of things to the CPAN. This is a lot, but none of them was very interesting. Mostly, I was updating my email address or adding some documentation about what Perl I plan to worry about in future releases. In some cases, there were typo or bug fixes. I thought I’d just write a little bit about this, from “why” to “how” to “how but another kind of how”.

I like Advent of Code, in theory, but in practice I never get very far. Around ten days on average, it looks like. (In 2015, I made it to 23! I didn’t remember that.) Anyway, it’s just, well, a lot. I don’t make enough time for it, and mostly I think that’s the right decision. On the other hand, I love a little coding challenge, and I love it twenty times more when other people are doing it and we can compare notes.

Another year, another thirty-one days of horror movies. Actually, we missed quite a few days as far as watching things all together. I worked a fair number of late nights, and I left town for a few days to see family in New England. We started a few days early, in fact, knowing that this would happen. So, plenty of things were watched, and here’s how it went…

Yesterday, I released perl v5.36.0. I think this is the most exciting release of perl in quite some time, and I’m hoping that in a few months, I’ll still be as pleased with it as I am today. Here’s a summary of what we got done, what we didn’t get done, and (to some extent) how it got done.

This is not a long paean for mutt or Fastmail, although I’m a big fan of both. It’s more of a Stupid Mutt Trick.

In 2004 or so I wrote Rubric, which was initially intended to be a bookmark manager, and then I added notes to it, and then it very quickly became the software powering my blog. It’s pretty crufty under the hood, being built in CGI::Application, which was a nice web framework in 2004, but never really modernized in the ways I would’ve liked.

I am widely admired at work for my ability to have many, many browser tabs open. (That, at least, is what I take from the frequent shouts of “holy cow, man, look at your browser!”) Nonetheless, I have long thought that it would be worth getting my total tab count down. I have tabs open for a bunch of reasons.

When I upgrade my perl, which I do pretty often, the first thing I do is install Task::BeLike::RJBS (by running cpanm rjbs). This installs most of the stuff I’m going to need to do my normal work. Over time, I tend to find that it needs an update, because over the course of the last year or so I started using some new libraries that didn’t get into the bundle. (This will happen less now that I’m using the monthly blead snapshots day to day again, but it’s a real thing.)

I have quite a few Perl software libraries available on the CPAN. I’ve written these at different points over the last twenty years, but almost all of them, until pretty recently, were written to support perl v5.8, which was released about 18 years ago. Perl v5.10 took almost four years to come out after v5.8. It had some teething problems, and then v5.12 took another three years.