Grinnz

> First, opting in to an experimental feature could be a one-liner, “use experimental feature ‘try’” or similar. There’s no point in punishing your valuable beta testers beyond that with a second line that’s entirely redundant with the first one.

It is. "use experimental 'try';" works already.

> The larger problem is the versions. This basically requires someone to update their script headers all the time if they want to keep getting new features.

This is intentional. The largest strength of Perl is that, barring significant security-type issues, a script written in 1995 will still run with the version of Perl you've installed. If you write a script with "use v5.36", you would change that version only if you intend to modernize the script with features from a newer version, and determine that such features don't break the script. This is harder to determine for some features than others, for example applying the 'unicode_strings' feature to an existing script written without it is rather perilous.

> That it would be maintained is all that really mattered to me, and there's no doubt in my mind that it would be.

Nor mine, but because I know that Perl 7 would die as most of the maintainers stayed working on Perl 5. Or the worst case: too many leave Perl entirely to maintain either fork. Perhaps some corporations would take up the funding, but it is not a simple piece of software you can throw new developers at and expect progress; it's an enormous C program built on thousands of macros and decades of history, as anyone who has tried writing XS code probably sees in their nightmares.

> As soon as you make breaking changes,

I am referring specifically to doing it without breaking changes, as is the current plan, and the only option at this juncture.

You were reading between the lines, and the initial announcement was writing between them. But like I said, it is not feasible to maintain a LTS Perl 5 next to a fork of the interpreter. The actual proposal was only even to maintain Perl 5 for a few years before sunsetting it. CPAN would not have been compatible with Perl 7, it would require a separate ecosystem of code and installed libraries. The ideas sound nice but I don't think a lot of people would have been happy with how the details would have worked out. Most of the problems you're talking about are more a deficiency of perception and tooling, and these can be addressed without such drastic measures.

Sinking to their level doesn't move anyone forward.

For the record, shitting on other languages does not represent the values of Libera #perl. Though I personally would not use python or PHP, use whatever gets the job done.

The CPAN upload and the commit message are two separate incidents, but to your point, things can be removed from BackPAN through some effort, and efforts are being made.

Only the person who uploaded a distribution can schedule it for deletion, and yes, anyone could do this with currently-indexed versions of their modules. Relying foremost on the goodwill of authors rather than the intervention of PAUSE overlords is a feature of CPAN, not a bug.

I'm not sure what you tried with ADOPTME, but transferring first-come permissions to ADOPTME would remove your ability to maintain them and allow anyone to adopt the permissions. Permissions for future uploads are a rather separate concern from the currently indexed latest version of the module that dependency chains rely on. The index does not include distributions on BackPAN, so such distributions are only available via manual intervention.

The article has now been updated to correctly indicate that other than Sawyer, these events are specifically regarding TPF and not the community as a whole. Thanks to the author for clarifying things.

My comment saying this on the article has now been downvoted enough to hide it. I guess they don't care about the article making actively false statements like "The Perl community is in a shambles due to disputes concerning its (nonexistent) Code of Conduct, its (inconsistent) enforcement of community standards, and an inability to agree on what constitutes toxicity or a proper response to it." and "At least five extremely senior Perl community members have resigned from their positions and/or withdrawn from working on Perl itself"

While you're correct, what they "left" is actually a non-programming legal foundation (other than Sawyer X), and so the commenter is actually correct that this ultimately does not have the impact on the Perl community that the article suggests.

There doesn't, and most of this doesn't actually affect the Perl community or development at large.

More context: they are in the (slow) process of shutting down servers one at a time and bringing them up running InspIRCd with new Anope services, with none of the old channel or nick registrations.