Hi all, I've been a little too silent lately. Actually, I've been fairly silent on the Inline front for 6 months now. (No releases since July) I guess that's the way it goes with Open Source stuff. You can try to set goals, but since you're doing it in your "free" time, those goals often get pushed back.
I'd like to let you guys know what's going on in my life, if not just to make me feel better. As far as Open Source goes, I've been spending almost all my time on YAML.pm. Version 0.30, which implements almost the entire YAML specification (http://www.yaml.org) was released Tuesday. I gave a talk on it Tuesday night to the Seattle Perl User's Group. I believe that YAML will become an even more important module than Inline. YAML is the module that I want to have by my side, everytime I write Perl, (or Python or Java or Ruby for that matter). But now that I have a working and usable YAML.pm out there, I can start working on my other objectives. The reason that YAML.pm had be done first, is that every other project of mine requires YAML. Even Inline-0.50 will use it. And in 6-9 months, YAML will be rewritten with Inline :) Another big project that I have planned, but haven't even started yet is NAPC. NAPC is the thing that will take care of all of CPANs woes. Even the woes that were raised on this list yesterday. It will also make PPM truly usable. Just for the record, Neil Watkiss has done some amazing work on PPM3. If the modules were up to date, it would be a true killer app. I think it is beyond the means of ActiveState, or any one group to make this happen. But NAPC will make it happen, because it shares the burden on the entire community. I've also been trying to write an Inline book for O'Reilly. Neil and Patrick are helping me on that one. In addition to that I'm also supposed to be editing Inline author, Sam Tregar's new book. These efforts are being hampered by the fact that I've accepted a new job in Hilton Head South Carolina, at a company called Databuilt. It's a Perl shop and looks like it will be a lot of fun. I'm taking a break from packing my entire apartment at this very moment. Anyone want to lend a hand? :) As for Inline, there are still myriad projects that I need to do. These include Inline-0.44, Inline-0.50 and Inline::Shell. I *have* to do these, because I want them to be in the book. I broke my promise about giving you Inline-0.44 for Christmas. I'm sorry about that. To address the concern du jour. PerlApp: It is my opinion that you should only use PerlApp with Inline if you build the Inline code into a full fledged Inline-based module (using the VERSION config option). I don't think I would want to support it any other way. Will it work if you do that? I'm not sure. I seem to remember Gisle saying that there were still issues. I think the only issue may be that you need to tell PerlApp to include Inline.pm explicitly. Actually, if you do that, I see no reason why it won't work. I suggest that the interested parties download the trial version, get it work, and post instructions. Neil should be able to convince Gisle, if there really is a bug to be fixed. But please don't expect Inline to compile code under PerlApp. You'd just be asking for trouble. PerlApp doesn't have the correct concept of a file system, IIRC. Cheers, Brian .... ok, back to packing ...
