Hello Perlists and Zebras,
Today was quite a big day for the module ecosystem, and as not everyone
lives on the IRC I feel obliged to announce the changes to the wider
world.
First of all, my fork of the ecosystem repo is now merged into
perl6/ecosystem. What changes does it introduce? If you look closely,
the modules list is now not a list of names and urls, but a list of urls
to some json files. Those, called META.info are now the officia^Wmain,
and modern way of publishing your module to a Perl 6 community. It has
been around for a while now, but mostly as an experimental thing: now it
becomes The Way To Publish Your Modules. Don't hide your excitement!
Of course the http://modules.perl6.org website has been updated to use
the META.list too. If you look closely, you will see that some of the
modules have a nice-looking names now, like Foo::Bar rather than
perl6-Foo-Bar. That's just a side effect of the new infrastructure.
Worried that you haven't touched your project for ages, and it is no
gone forever? No worries: every module which still haven't been updated
to the new spec now lives in a so called SHELTER [1] - every sad module
which doesn't yet have a META.info has been given one: for free! It's
far from perfect, but keeps your module from being forgotten.
Why should you care then? If the Proper Module Name doesn't seem
attractive enough, look at modules.perl6.org again. See the badges? At
the moment of writing this, there are probably three of them. But you
may alredy notice four, or at least four slots. That's right, a new
badge! Everyone who makes his/her module conformant to the new specs [2]
will be awarded with a Cute Panda [3] badge. Panda as in panda, the
module manager [4]. Panda badge means your module is panda-friendly, and
everyone using it to install Perl 6 modules (I don't think there is any
other way at the moment) will be able to fully experience and appreciate
your work. Go for it!
Please look through the new spec [2] and see how do you like it. It's
pretty far from the previous philosophy (whatever you make module
managers will install), but I believe the changes are for the better. If
you disagree, or have some awesome idea, please contribute. Constructive
criticism is very welcome.
TL;DR:
* There is a new spec for Perl 6 modules [2]
* Make your module spec-compatibile to achieve fame, glory and
cheezburgers
Have an appropriate amount of fun!
[1] https://github.com/perl6/ecosystem/tree/master/SHELTER
[2] https://github.com/perl6/ecosystem/blob/master/spec.pod
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Panda_Cub_from_Wolong,_Sichuan,_China.JPG
[4] https://github.com/tadzik/Pies
--
Tadeusz Sośnierz
