Perl bugs now on GitHub

For over 17 years, the Perl NOC has hosted an RT instance for Perlbug, the system that tracks and manages Perl bugs and feature requests.  Two weekends ago, it transitioned to GitHub.    Background is available in this thread.

We'd especially like to thank Todd Rinaldo who led the migration and did most of the work.  His attention to detail cannot be understated.  17 years of data (some of which had been migrated to RT from the previous system) required a lot of tweaking and polishing to make it look nice.  His hard work shows in the result.

It's been fun and interesting to support this particular piece of Perl development for so long.  We're excited about the new possibilities that GitHub's platform enables for Perl's fourth decade.

Henk Penning

It is with great sadness that we must report that Henk "HPP" Penning passed away this summer.  For the last decade he was the sole maintainer of the CPAN mirrors list, patiently working with hundreds of mirror operators around the world. He also managed the system that monitored the status of those mirrors, ensuring that out of date mirrors were quickly detected and removed.  His “instant mirroring” client was used by many mirrors to ensure that their copy of CPAN was up to date within minutes of a new package being added.

Even through the end, he carefully, gracefully, and with lots of patience made sure others had access to the systems he was running. He quietly worked in the background, but every Perl developer benefited from his work, knowingly or not.

He was also member of the Apache Software Foundation (and also managed their mirror network).  They posted a very nice memorial page that's worth reading.

We remember Henk for his ever present kindness and helpfulness.  The Perl and broader open source communities are will miss him.

- Ask & Robert

New perldoc site

Our friends at OpusVL have built a beautiful new perldoc.perl.org site.

The site automatically gets updated with new versions, and all the old URLs should work.

To report bugs, make pull requests or feature suggestions, see the GitHub projects: perldoc.perl.org-engine and perldoc.perl.org-export.

(The site is still on the Fastly CDN, so it should load nice and fast anywhere).

Maintenance Week

We're making some changes to the perl NOC hosting infrastructure this week.  There may be some instability.  We'll do our best to minimize it.  When we're done, we'll post an update with what's changed....

Email Outage

Due to a server failure, perl.org and cpan.org email is not currently flowing.  We're working on repairing it, but it may take several hours.

Update: The instance has suffered significant file-system corruption.  We're attempting to restore from a backup.  This may result in the loss of a small amount of mail that had been received but not yet delivered.

Update: Mail is flowing again.  It may take a few hours for the backlog to clear.