Managing Bulk DNS Zones with Perl

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http://www.oreillynet.com/nlr/perl/11/20/02/top
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Greetings, Starfighter^WPerl hacker!

This is Schuyler Erle, Perl hacker for O'Reilly & Associates. 
Because Simon's still away on holiday, it's once again my pleasure 
to bring you the latest news and developments on www.perl.com and 
all across the world of Perl.

* Perl at large.

Rather a quiet week in Perl, all things considered. About the only 
major news was the announcement that rsync access to the main CPAN 
mirror in Finland would be moved from ftp.hut.fi to 
rsync.nic.hut.fi.  Unless you're maintaining a CPAN mirror, this 
probably won't matter much to you, but you can read all about it 
at:

     http://use.perl.org/articles/02/11/15/194218.shtml?tid=32

Chances are more likely that you're one of the many folks with 
code distributed over the CPAN, and if you are, or if you'd like 
to be, you might be interested in the recent release of Brian 
Ingerson's CPAN::MakeMaker, a drop-in replacement for 
ExtUtils::MakeMaker.

ExtUtils::MakeMaker, as you may know, ships with every copy of 
Perl, and is the engine behind the Makefile.PL used to build and 
install virtually every Perl module distribution. If you've ever 
tried to work with MakeMaker, you also know that it's both 
incredibly powerful *and* incredibly difficult to configure 
correctly. Brian frames the problem in his announcement:

     "The bad thing about this legacy workhorse is that the Perl
     community is crippled to significantly improve it. Any 
     features added now can only enhance the current release of 
     Perl. Authors would shun new features anyway, because their 
     modules could not be used in earlier versions of Perl that 
     account for the overwhelming majority of installations."

CPAN::MakeMaker seeks to address this problem as well as make some 
of ExtUtils::MakeMaker's features easier to use, and it does so 
in a particularly clever way. Check out the announcement to 
perl5-porters, the philosophy behind the module's creation, and 
then go get it from the CPAN:

     http://archive.develooper.com/[email protected]/msg88476.html

     http://search.cpan.org/author/INGY/CPAN-MakeMaker/

As Brian puts it in CPAN::MakeMaker's documentation, "Make the Switch!"

* What's new on www.perl.com?

Perl's usefulness for building Web applications is extraordinarily 
well known. Yet equally important and often overlooked is Perl's 
considerable utility for making quick work of mundane and often 
tedious system administration tasks. This week, Chris Josephes 
takes us through a case study of one such problem, namely, 
managing reverse DNS entries for domains with large numbers of 
hosts. Chris details how BIND zone files can be easily and quickly 
built using Net::Netmask and just a bit of Perl.

Also this week, Piers Cawley returns with another installment of 
his Perl 6 mailing list summary. This past week, Dan Sugalski 
emerged from the Lightweight Languages workshop with a roadmap 
for the near future of Perl 6 internals development; Clint Pierce 
implements QuickBASIC in Parrot; Scheme support in Parrot gets 
functions; JIT support gets a major boost; and discussion 
continues to rage on perl6-language over continuations and the 
fates of := and ^.

Until next week, noble Perl hackers!

SDE

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Nat Goodman on the Myths and Realities of BioPerl and Damian
Conway's 2-part Perl Regexes tutorials are two reasons no
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Save up to $455 when you register by December 16
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*** Featured Articles ***

Managing Bulk DNS Zones with Perl
Chris Josephes describes the challenges to system administrators 
in maintaining forward and reverse DNS records, and how a clever 
sysadmin can use Perl to automate this often tedious task.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/11/20/dns.html

***

This week on Perl 6 (11/10-11/17, 2002)
A quick Perl 6 roadmap, plus some JIT improvements, mysterious 
coredump fixes, continuations, superpositions, invocants, tests, 
and programming BASIC and Scheme in Parrot.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/11/p6pdigest/20021121.html

***

Object Oriented Exception Handling in Perl
Arun Udaya Shankar discusses implementing object-oriented 
exception handling in Perl, using Error.pm. Also covered are 
the advantages of using exceptions over traditional error 
handling mechanisms, basic exception handling with eval {}, 
and the use of Fatal.pm.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/11/14/exception.html

***

This week on Perl 6 (10/28-11/03, 2002)
Bytecode formats, "Simon Cozens versus the world", and more...

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/11/p6pdigest/20021107.html

***

Writing Perl Modules for CPAN
For many years, the Perl community has extolled the virtues of 
CPAN and re-usable, modular code. But why hasn't there been 
anything substantial written on how to achieve it? Sam Tregar 
redresses the balance, and this month's book review looks at how 
he got on.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/11/06/review.html

***

This week on Perl 6 (10/20-27, 2002)
C# and Parrot, fun with operators, a license change, and more...

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/11/p6pdigest/20021027.html

***

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