Along the year I some took notes about Perl events/news and it's time to drop my retrospective!

Perl governance

This year saw several changes around the Perl core governance with the setup of Perl steering committee and Perl Proposal for Enhancement (I think it since changed its name to RFCs). We now have people opening RFCs e.g. RFC 004.

The perlgov policy have seen several changes, perl 5 maintainers are now using Perl topicbox space for administrative discussions (e.g. voting) while p5p still remains for technical discussions.

SawyerX resigned and we now have 3 Perl pumpkins instead only one.

Perl core

Apple decided to enable -Werror producing trouble in Perl 5 core, a grant for documentations improvements was accepted (in addition to the usual core maintenance grants) and... The original Perl 7 idea died.

The feature "signature" was proposed to become no longer experimental, a new (experimental) isa keyword appeared and Cor changed its name to Corinna!

The perl5 repository gets 1000 stars:

Concerning releasing flow, the development versions of Perl restarted after some months of pause (at least to test non-regressions on the CPAN river).

Deprecations

There were serious discussions about maintainer-ship and the status of libemperl in Debian. The same kind of adventure happened to mod_perl being candidate to go "attic" (going attic means being archived, and we usually never returns from this place).

Kritika.io also closed this year :/

Toolchain

Neil Bowers (one of our current Pumpkins) spent time to resolve inconsistent permissions while malicious code was found in module AutoLoad.

The CPAN mirror list was finally abandoned since fastly CDN is doing the same job.

@davorg came with CPAN Dashboards.

The "Bus factor river" was added to MetaCPAN:

Community

People doing Weekly Challenge started to post live coding sessions!

Once again this year the major Perl conference TPRCiC was online (and a success... and I gave talks \o/)

Perl (and Raku) also had their own room at FOSDEM 2021.

The must-have space game Tau Station has launched (by mistake for the record) its kickstarter.

The ticket tracker rt.cpan.org was announced as closing then finally the maintenance handed over and rt.cpan.org moved to new home (with an upgrade). Despite github issue tracker being often preferred, Request Tracker is a very good issue tracker and offers an independent issue tracker (what if github suddenly decided to change its policy towards open source?)

Another event that happened and had some echo outside or Perl community was when Perl.com was kind of "hacked".

Once again this year we had Perl advent calendar and even the Leonerd advent calendar.

And... The #perl on devto started to work well 😀

Other

The Rex friendly automation framework celebrated its 4000th commit and its 10 years 🎉

Do you know inxi ?

Raku

Raku community discussed about having its own foundation and organized its first dedicated conference!

Conclusion

That was a complicated year, Perl is changing, moving forwards but not without trouble.

I hope you enjoyed this retrospective!