My participation to the Perl Toolchain Summit 2025

(cover by Hunter Haley)

What is the Perl Toolchain Summit?

The Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS) nee "Perl QA Hackathon" is an amazing event, in the form of an hackathon, taking place yearly in Europe.

It's a open source gathering of several critically important people running the Perl infrastructure.

(picture from Ant Rozetsky)

Some of the vital pieces of software taken care at Perl Toolchain Summit are:

• PAUSE, CPAN and MetaCPAN
• CPAN installers: cpan, cpanp, cpanm, cpm, etc...
• Builders: ExtUtils::MakeMaker, Module::Build, Module::Build::Tiny
• Smokers: CPANTesters, Test::Smoke
• Authoring tools: Dist::Zilla, Dist::Milla, Minilla, etc...
• Test frameworks: Test2, etc...
• CPAN Security

This gathering, invite-only, is happening once a year and group together a lot of essential folks running Perl and CPAN.

It is made possible thanks to the generous sponsoring of companies.

By sponsoring this event, companies both mark their strong belief in Free Software and help maintaining the present/future quality of Perl ecosystem (or give thanks for past good and loyal service for years).

It radiates well beyond the event since the attendees are committed to Perl all along the year before and after the summit.

To give you an example, see the list of achievements of CPAN Security group in 2024 (which is particularly relevant since CPANSec group was created at Perl Toolchain Summit 2023 and will be again well represented during this summit)

What about /me?

This year, I got invited to the Perl Toolchain Summit. It will be my first time :)

I felt honored and blessed to receive an invitation.

"Woohoo!" \o/

I'm now feeling excited to join this event and meet all those great names.

I'm far from the value of some core members participating to the Perl Toolchain Summit but I think this invitation rewards my involvement in Perl toolchain (and Perl in general). So I would lie to say that I'm an imposter. But still, I will try be up to the chance I'm given!

My plan

I'm involved in multiple topics but I'm thinking I will work mainly on the 3 following topics:

1. Perl interpreter smoke test tooling (for which I'm the maintainer now)
2. Security (along with CPANSec group) where I've been involved lately
3. CPAN in general (PAUSE, indexes, installers, architecture, etc...)

Topics 2. and 3. are largely overlapping themself.

For the topics involving collaboration, I'm not going with big breaking ideas but mostly with little realistic changes that I consider with relatively big "return on invest". I think there's some inertia (because of the compatibility value being deep rooted in the DNA of Perl) that we should respect and should make us "reasonable dreamers".

If you're used to read me, you know that I'm also thinking out of the technical box. Sometimes speaking about the social nature of CPAN or how communication impacts as much as technical excellence.

I'm not fixing myself "success criteria" to fulfill to consider I would have succeeded my summit. If I'm preparing a bit, I also want to keep some "freshness" toward the event.

What else to say now apart that I can't wait to be there!

Meanwhile...

Happy Perl Hacking!