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Postings from February 2007
Nicholas Clark wrote: [...] > But this is not about Perl 5 Porters. > > One thing Perl 5 PR-related I'm really missing is David's summaries. Please accept my apology. Real Life has soaked up my spare time recently. We replaced our payroll system at $work at the end of last year. This put a clamp on lunch-time summarising, and my wife, whom I love dearly, began to find the evenings rather long with me spending all my spare time at the keyboard. > I'd guess that David wouldn't object to help in getting them restarted. I have a number of hackish scripts to scrape xray and prepare the skeleton; nothingmuch has written some excellent tools to prepare the groundwork for kudra to use in writing the p6 summaries. And yet that's not the hard part. I would love some help, but the difficulty resides in finding an elegant division of labour. Adriano and I tried it for a couple of summaries, but spent much more time fiddling with diffs than doing anything else. While he had the time, we tried it one week on, one week off, but even that poses problems of knowing where the cut-off point the previous week was and in some ways it made the pressure worse for the summariser that week. > I remember a comment he relayed when he started them last year, that someone > had thought that Perl 5 development is dead, because he'd heard nothing, and > it was a pleasant surprise to find that it was not. This was actually a recurring theme. Someone else wrote to me personally to say that they had made a donation to TPF because they enjoyed the summaries. Oh man, I had managed to blank that from my mind until just now. oops. One other data point. I gave a talk at FPW on the changes in 5.10, and a lot of people were blown away by all the things that have happened. Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni suggested that there was sufficient material to make a two-pronged approach to PR. A simpler version for the trade rags (blogs these days I guess) and more detailed version slated to sites like slashdot. But we've got to get the buzz out there. This is of course predicated on getting 5.10 out the door. > Meanwhile I have things to think about merging to maint, which I should get > back to. I want to get back into the swing of things, but given my current workload I don't think I'll have much time until the end of the month to restart the summaries. David