Re: PSC #086: 2022-11-11

* Ricardo Signes <perl.p5p@rjbs.manxome.org> [2022-11-11 12:18:42 -0500]:

> Porters,
> 
> Philippe and Paul and I met on Zoom today.  Here's what we talked about.
> 
> *What can we do to make things easier for new contributors?*  Philippe was wondering about improving perlguts, perlinterp, perlhack, and perlapi.  Paul was not sure this would pay off, because there are so many areas that someone might show up and want to work on.

Anything you do here is going to create non-technical overhead, because all of those
resources seem to be necessarily complex. There is no silver bullet here, either. I think
the cheapest thing that can be done is to just be ready to recognize a contributor when
they show up; then someone can take an interest in directing them. And I am not saying
simply, "be nice" or "don't be mean". I am saying, take a practical interest in the problem
they want to solve and direct them in a way that is only possible between individuals of
unequal knowledge and talent; both with similar goals and interests in mind - one with zeal
and the other with the wisdom and knowledge. Could turn out to be a good combo.

For long term attraction, having a track at the big perl/Perl conferences specifically focused
down and dirty details about hacking on core by those who know would be both interesting
and well worth the time and effort. If only a couple of well coordinated talks are done per
year and per conference, pretty soon there would be a nice set of talks on these activities.

Basically, some well decided topics just need to be there waiting in an easily consumable
format for someone with interest to pass by. Yes it's passive and yes this usually means video
but it will give the community the best bang for the buck.

> 
> Another question that came up was, "Is the existing state of things worse than nothing?"  Paul ended with, "I'm the wrong person to ask, because this document wouldn't be targeting me."  Rik had a similar take.
> 
> "It's easier to answer specific questions.  Write me the first page and I'll write you the rest of the book."  Anyway, this is a conundrum we've discussed many times.
> 
> *Smartmatch!*  Philippe has been sending patches to people whose CPAN libraries will be affected.  We discussed autodie at some length, which is core and generates code that uses ~~.  We believe this can be fixed, but it needs some more work than we could give it on the call.
> 
> *Announcements?*  When we have things to announce like "smartmatch is being formally deprecated", where should we post these things?  "Well," said Paul, "until last week I was thinking Twitter?"
> 
> But what place can people best get the simple updates?  p5p is more than many want it.  blogs.perl.org and RSS aggregators are not, we think, really well read.  Probably the current answer remains "Every week we post the PSC updates to blogs.perl.org and tweet a link to that."  Extra announcements get an extra post.

Being well read is not really good criteria. There just needs to be a clear and
singular place for those who care enough to find it or link to it.

I know during the summer there was some effort to collect enough of a critical mass
of twitter users, but I am willing to bet this is not the place to post viral Perl
news - and probably should not be the main vector.

blogs.perl.org seems like a good singular point for the announcement. Some well placed
shares at places like Perl Monks, Slashdot, eddit, and Hacker News directing people back
to the blog article could help the ball rolling. I think an obligatory tweet and some judicious
use of the irc spam bot might help. If metacpan has a prominent place for such news, then
this might be useful. Obviously, when it comes out perldelta.

Probably the most important part would be to centralize all the comments and discussion by
pointing them to a specifical clearing house for comments so those "in the know" can handle
them if needed.

Hope something in there helps.

Cheers,
Brett

> 
> *Other news:*  "use feature 'module_true'" is now in core and in the v5.38 feature bundle!  RFC 13, for overloading in concatenation and join, is looking good and now only waiting on substr?
> 
> -- 
> rjbs, LeoNerd, and BooK

-- 
--
oodler@cpan.org
oodler577@sdf-eu.org
SDF-EU Public Access UNIX System - http://sdfeu.org
irc.perl.org #openmp #pdl #native

• PSC #086: 2022-11-11 by Ricardo Signes
• Re: PSC #086: 2022-11-11 by Oodler 577 via perl5-porters