Last Night's Meeting A Success

[David L. Nicol]

Frank and Doug basicly rocked the house, if it is possible
to rock a house with a laptop running the unadulterated e
window manager.

In attendence:

David Nicol
Stephen Clouse
Garrett Goebel
Frank Wiles
Adrian Griffis
Glenn Crocker
Doug Sparling
Mike Morgan


Topics that made their way into my notes included:

Dealing with the ongoing "code red" crisis

Kansas's strict "unauthorized use" law

Abuse.net

the Attributes::Handler and Attributes CPAN modules

What perl6->rfc97 is all about

"TERN"

******************************************************

The Presentation begins:

        How working with a publisher goes:

        publishers have proposal forms, often right on their websites

Book proposals consist of a draft table of contents, then the
publisher will ask for a writing sample, then a contract will
be worked out, including a time line and payment schedule and
at that point you are obligated to Write A Book.

All negotiations for Instant Perl Modules were conducted
entirely by e-mail.

Some chapters were slightly behind schedule, or short because
the material was small and the authors did not wish to pad
unreasonably.  McGraw-Hill supplied a "tech editor" who 
demanded rewrites of some code examples.  The authors divided
the labor by chapter.  Proofs appeared and there was some
tension over use of MS-WORD templates.

Doug now knows why there are errors in books, and believes
you can judge the quality of a publisher by the ease with
which you can get to a given book's errata.

David "Data Munging" Cross has picked up tech editing work
based on reviews posted on Amazon.

David Adler of NY.PM has worked as a tech editor.

Frank is bewildered at Simon Cozen's refusal to include
a patch to add multiple delivery features with his procmail
replacement CPAN module.

"Studio B" is an agency for authors.

The current perl distribution suffers from kitchen-sink-itis.

The shift in coding style between multiple projects was
initially confusing.

"Cleaning one's office" would make a good example of
a process that can be interrupted and resumed rather than
starting over at the beginning, for the coroutines documentation.

"Marketing people" wrote the book cover and author notes to
Instant Perl Modules.

PHB-style management may be stupidly unwilling to invest in
proper backup hardware; it can be difficult to get a budget
approved.

backup strategies

secondary MXes

Sprint's thick redundant hardware failover systems, in which
a system can go wrong and be down for months before there is a
problem. "They have backup clusters" was said.

Sprint's corporate culture, in which a few core competent people
do a good enough job that many "fat" people can ride.

Serve clusters in Lee's Summit

Esrey realty

*********************************************

Presentation, part two: How To Build A CPAN Module

Frank packages all projects as modules, which makes installing
them on new systems very easy.

To start building a module called KCPM::August, you would
first run

        h2xs -A -X KCPM::August

and that would create a directory of stubs, and enough
make files to allow

        make dist

to build a distribable tar file.

It is advised to read the MakeMaker man page.

the "manifest.skip" file can include a list of files to leave
out of a distribution.

Nobody particularly wants to review the Programming In Awk
nutshell book, even though Awk is a lowest common denominator
for scripting, and is available on machines that do not have perl,
in case you ever find yourself working in such a situation.


Frank's laptop runs Enlightenment window manager with no desktop manager.

the

        make dist

operation will fail if

        make MANIFEST

is not performed first.  I consider this a bug and suggest that MANIFEST
be added to the autogenerated file as a dependency for dist.  I hallucinate
that if it was, any changes in the directory would result in an edited
MANIFEST file getting clobbered. (that would not happen unless there
were targets listed as dependencies of MANIFEST.)  The room embarks on
a digression into this hallucination, producing


        manifest_ck:
                test -f MANIFEST || make MANIFEST

        dist: manifest_ck


on the dry-erase board.


The semantics of creating package files whose purpose is to bundle
multiple other packages is discussed.  Modules that export functions
would need to have their functions re-exported.  I suggest creating
a module that would checkpoint the current name-space and then,
after importing some keywords, export them to the calling package.

Garrett suggests that it could be called "Pollute.pm" because it
pollutes the caller's name space.

The syntax would go something like this:


        (in file "Buick.pm")

        use Pollute;
        use Automobile::GM::Buick::CruiseControl;
        use Sensors::Automotive::TirePressure::Buick;
        Pollute;

I considered that homework: please investigate attached
Pollute-0.01.tar.gz and evaluate for uploadability. Anyone feel
like writing a test?


Michael Morgan talked about his plans for a music publication
service for local (or otherwise unsigned) musicians

There was a discussion of DVD lasers, and how the fact that
some CDRs will get destroyed if played in a DVD player might
be due to the laser strength rather than a plot to enforce
the music industry surcharge on CDR media.

Before adjourning, the meeting observed a moment of silence
in honor of the king, Elvis Presley, who passed away on this
date in 1977.



-- 
                                           David Nicol 816.235.1187
"Tomato!"

Pollute-0.01.tar.gz