Perl Mongers Meeting

This Thursday the Israeli Perl Mongers had a meeting where Stas Bekman gave a several hours talk about mod_perl 2.0. Many people attended the meeting (about 20-25), and we had a lot of fun. The lecture was very instructive, and taught a lot about what can be done with mod_perl besides writing simple CGI scripts.

After the meeting was over, I explained to someone about Subversion as he said he had problems with CVS and was looking for a good alternative. (I eventually wrote an E-mail to the mailing list about it). Oron Peled gave me and Kfir Lavy a ride home as he was returning home to Haifa. We asked him about his past experience with UNIX and what he does now, and we had a very interesting conversation on the way home.

Project Introductions at the TAU OSS Course

Yesterday, I went to a lecture of the Tel-Aviv University Open Source development course. There was a lecture there about CVS, which I interrupted with some corrections and additions. After the lecture several people and I introduced our projects to the students.

I gave a 10 minute introduction about Freecell Solver (that was accompanied by a demonstration of kpat solving Freecell). One of the Xparam developers gave an overview of his Xparam project. Shachar Shemesh said some words about Hamakor NPO, and then introduced the WINE project to the students.

The students in the course are expected to choose a project to work on and to perform about 300 hours of work each on it. The Xparam guy got three students who were interested in the project and gave him their details. When I returned home, and checked my E-mail, I found out from the course initiator that two students expressed interest in Freecell Solver as well, and would probably contact me. I did not hear from them yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Subversion and Perl Makefile.PL - problem and solution

I now started to maintain LM-Solve using Subversion. However, after importing the project into Subversion, I encountered a problem that I remembered from Linux::Kernel::Module::Builder: the Makefile.PL also did something with all the files under the .svn/ files. (and in my case even corrupted the working copy).

A quick Googling made me realize that the solution was to install the development snapshot of ExtUtils::MakeMaker and use it instead. This has worked, and the Subversion resident Perl guru told me the same thing on the IRC.

Subversion Neon Usage

Subversion has a problem of asking confirmation of a certificate for as many times as the https:// path has path components, as it keeps trying upward components. I wrote a fix for this issue, and posted it to the Subversion development list. Ben Collins-Sussman criticized it saying it was a workaround and maybe we are using Neon (the WebDAV client library) wrong.

I inspected the code of Neon and found it does indeed return a plain NE_ERROR error if the certificate's authenticity failed. This makes it impossible to tell if we failed due to that or due to something else altogether. We decided to wait for the Neon project head to tell us what he makes of it, and what we should do.

Dmoz.org Perl Tutorials Category Blues

My application for editing the Dmoz.org Perl "FAQs, Help and Tutorials" category was rejected for the third time. This time, there were problems in the grammar of my submission (which I'll make sure won't happen next time) and some vague critique of what is present in my exis