Life has a way of moving between peaks and troughs. One could probably analyse those peaks and troughs in a number of ways using the various wonderful PDL features both in core, and the various excellent plugins!
When CHM did in fact pass the maintainer torch, it was my intention to weigh in and acknowledge this. Life got in the way, as it sometimes can. Luis's question was well-timed as I've just been able to start doing some open-source work again. CHM has done fantastic work on this project during all the years I've been part of it, and it is an awesome responsibility to try to match his standards. If PDL continues to excel, and to meet users' needs, it will be because of CHM, and various other luminaries and contributors. On his watch, the code stayed stable, advanced to new fundamental technological capabilities such as 64-bit computing, and moved to more powerful, easier collaboration using GitHub. So, let us all thank CHM, and seek to continue his work. Let us then consider together what we want out of PDL. The immediate next steps are for me to cut a dev release of PDL as-is, to see how it does with CPAN testers. As you know, I have been showing the possibilities of breaking up PDL, using the PDLA banner. That can continue, if people want to move in that direction. Like CHM, I am cautious about breaking up PDL itself, but will be happy to import the PDLA work back into PDL and shutter PDLA if that is what people want. I am optimistic that with "cpanm" and other tools, a broken-up PDL will work exactly as well as the current monolith, but install much faster. The only caveat is that I don't really want to divide efforts by doing active work on both PDL and PDLA. Please weigh in! Additionally, to answer Luis's immediate question, there are many different aspects to the PDL ecosphere, to which important, even vital contributions are possible. One could start by reading the various introductory documents available under http://pdl.perl.org/?docs=Tutorials&title=PDL::Tutorials * Do you like explaining things? Go over the various docs, and look for ways to improve them. * Do you like working with C and parsers? The "advanced" section explains the PDL API, and also the parser PDL::PP (there are some improvements I want to make to simplify that). * Do you like devops etc? You can make the PDL distro be automatically generatable, probably using Dist::Zilla. * Do you like modern web techniques? You could complete Joel's excellent start to converting pdl.perl.org itself from its current form, to a more JavaScript-driven site, available within the PDLPorters GitHub organisation. * Do you like measuring things? You could do an up-to-date, like-for-like performance comparison between PDL, R, numpy, MATLAB, ... * Do you want to support and advance science? My sketched-out "repro" tool, which allows you to specify software (e.g. PDL) modules and versions, input data, operations (such as a supplied script), and observed output data, will provide a starting point for people to reproduce (hence the name) scientific results, but then to immediately modify those operations, or provide other data, and see what happens. This will probably operate using the GitHub APIs so you'd be able to automatically fork a provided "repro set" (as we could call it), and make pull requests with updates. The possibilities are endless. Please share your thoughts, and whether you would like to help out! All the best, Ed -----Original Message----- From: Luis Mochan Sent: Sunday, November 10, 2019 12:33 AM To: pdl-gene...@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Pdl-general] CHM passing on PDL maintainer torch On Sat, Nov 09, 2019 at 11:20:36PM +0100, Ingo Schmid wrote: > Hello, > > has this list and PDL development stopped altogether Hope not... > with Chris passing > on the hat? That would be a doubly sad development. I would like to learn about the innards of PDL and then help when I find me some time. What is the best way to start? Greetings, Luis -- o W. Luis Mochán, | tel:(52)(777)329-1734 /<(*) Instituto de Ciencias Físicas, UNAM | fax:(52)(777)317-5388 `>/ /\ Apdo. Postal 48-3, 62251 | (*)/\/ \ Cuernavaca, Morelos, México | moc...@fis.unam.mx /\_/\__/ GPG: 791EB9EB, C949 3F81 6D9B 1191 9A16 C2DF 5F0A C52B 791E B9EB _______________________________________________ pdl-general mailing list pdl-gene...@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pdl-general _______________________________________________ pdl-devel mailing list pdl-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pdl-devel
