One of the good ideas of the Google Summer of Code was to insist that every project has a mentor; an experienced person to advise and guide the grantee.
I'm wondering whether we could embrace this idea for perl5-porters. We often feel rather thin on the ground, and there are many people who might start to help, but the general feeling I get is that most find the first step daunting. Coupled with this I'm currently sitting at YAPC::EU, where there are lots of lightning talk slots free tomorrow. So I was wondering whether I should do a lightning talk about some of the approachable pure-perl tasks in the perltoto, in the hope of gaining some interest. But it would be more likely to succeed in its aim if there are actually some people who would volunteer to consider the task. I wasn't going to name anyone in a talk. People don't actually have to mentor anything - there's no shame in saying you'd consider it and then realising that you can't do it (and no need to say why) You don't need to know C. Let alone the perl source. Just have some confidence about how to go about tasks, and create well formed patches. Does this seem like a good idea? Nicholas Clark
