> Well, 5.6 is long gone. And frankly so even is the company that > Sarathy worked for, at least they are if you want to be picky about > it. "Activestate a division of Sophos" is a different beast to > "Activestate, home of the 5.6 Pumpking". I mean at what point will p5p > stop relying on AS to maintain this code? When they issue a formal > stop support notice?
Hi p5p'ers --
I couldn't let the above go by without comment.
In brief -- things change, but we're still here, and still 100% committed to Perl.
It's true that GSar doesn't spend much time on core Perl anymore. I'm sure none of you would begrudge him the fact that he led the development of a Perl-based tool that grew into a hugely successful enterprise solution, and feels a responsibility to help it grow and succeed. It is also true that gsar's job has made it hard for him to spend as much time on updating his CPAN modules.
ActiveState sees its key role in the Perl space as helping in those areas where the open source community won't naturally address. A long time ago, this focused on making Perl work well on Windows. Now, with a strong and active Perl on Windows community, we see our strength focusing more on packaging and distribution, and, of course, tools. This is why we still maintain & distribute ActivePerl, run the PPM service, which incorporate CPAN updates as frequently as we can make it, and work with platform vendors like HP to ensure strong support for Perl across the operating system landscape.
Some of our other ongoing Perl-related efforts which you might not know about include:
* Jan Dubois has taken over maintenance of the win32 modules from Sarathy, and is scheduled to upgrading them in CPAN and in ActivePerl
* Jan is also incorporating the PerlEx technology into ActivePerl
I know it's not as important to the p5p crowd, but I think the broader Perl community appreciates some of the other tool work we've done recently, such as the brand-spanking new Perl Dev Kit 6.0. As soon as we resolve some technical issues, we're planning on publishing on CPAN the Perl-Tk module Gisle built as part of that release (I think the Perl Dev Kit includes some of the nicest-looking Tk-based Perl apps ever built, but I'm biased). We're also adding Perl autocomplete & calltips to the next minor release of Komodo.
There are other projects ongoing that we can't talk about yet because of contractual constraints but that we believe will have significant value for Perl users in the long term.
I hope this clarifies where ActiveState stands w.r.t. Perl these days. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email me or Jan Dubois, who'se in charge of our Perl initiatives.
-- David Ascher Managing Director & Chief Technologist ActiveState -- Dynamic Tools for Dynamic Languages
PS: I'm not subscribed to p5p so remember to cc: me if you want me to read a reply =).
