As a side effect of something else, I found myself digging around in the archives of Perl5-Porters from quite a long time ago. For example, take a look at the archives from 10 years ago: http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/9608/threads.html Several names you see there are still active today, and others are still in contact, which is nice. Although I was surprised to discover that Jarkko had a different .sig back then. Nicholas Clark