Through a post
on Perl5-Porters, Nick raises some thoughts regarding the ongoing maintenance of Perl 5.
He floats the idea of a paid full-time job for error report triage. But that's not the
point I found so interesting that it moved me to post a link to it here.
The thing that
I found interesting is that there is a
list of Perl 5 To-do items ordered by level:
- Tasks that only need Perl knowledge
- Tasks that need a little sysadmin-type knowledge
- Tasks that need a little C knowledge
- Tasks that need a knowledge of XS
- Tasks that need a knowledge of the interpreter
- Big projects
grinder is featuring a "Perl5 To-do of the week" in his excellent Perl5-porters
summaries. I'd like to improve the visibility of the current (or past)
To-do item without duplicating grinder's work or having grinder
repost his To-do here. But I think these To-dos are a great way for you to
XP-whoreparticipate.
You could pick the current To-do
of the week and write a more thorough analysis of the steps needed for the implementation, together with more code.
Another approach could be to pick any current To-do and do that.
The third alternative, of course, would be to just go ahead and implement the current To-do item
completely.
There are bugs outstanding
on pure-perl modules like the Pod processors, especially the HTML
creation is supposed to be better. There also is the To-do of writing
a small checker that checks that no libc functions with high
potential for security holes are used by Perl:
nm libperl.a | ./miniperl -alne '$o = $F[0] if /:$/; print "$o $F[1]
+" if $F[0] eq "U" && $F[1] =~ /^(?:strn?c(?:at|py)|v?sprintf|gets)$/'
I think these To-dos are a great way to get started doing some work on Perl. Having a look through
the To-do list will likely turn up interesting items.