PSC #213 2026-02-02

With Leon at FOSDEM it was only Paul and Aristotle this week,
but the discussion ranged widely.

* We have run out of release manager volunteers and need people to step up.

* We briefly reviewed [the “confold” discussion][1]. Paul thought his
  [Syntax::Keyword::PhaserExpression][2] might be relevant. We didn’t
  conclude with any specific consensus and will just continue to watch
  the thread.

* We discussed [the “die on compile with undefined functions”
  thread][3]. Again there is Paul’s [B::LintSubs][4] which does this
  already, and because of the contrast of historic expectations in the
  language and anticipated expectations if such a check were added,
  suggesting the module may be the best way of addressing this. We will
  continue to watch the thread.

* We discussed the unsatisfactory situation that the CPAN client in core
  is unsuitable for many users due to excessive memory consumption,
  which is not easily addressed due to arcane code and a lack of clarity
  about which aspects of its behavior need to be preserved. This same
  lack of clarity means that addressing this by a clean-room rewrite of
  CPAN.pm itself is problematic, but fixing it by implementing a new
  client faces problems as well: including it in core from the start
  makes any mistakes costly to clean up, but prototyping it on CPAN
  raises the question of how a new CPAN client can gain traction. No
  conclusion was reached but this led to another discussion:

* How do we promote awareness of things on CPAN either as experiments
  slated for inclusion in core (so we can receive adequate design
  feedback) or as solutions to requirements for which core Perl is not
  the right vehicle to address (also a repeated theme during this
  meeting)? One idea that came up is that we seem to be far too stingy
  with recommendations of CPAN things in core documentation:
  recommendations can always be rescinded, without requiring any user
  code at all to be touched in order to keep working, whereas even the
  “easiest” things to remove from core do require downstream changes. So
  we should be generous with recommendations.

[1]: https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/;msgid=61DB7DA4-43D3-4519-99EF-AEC98D7B7181%40lnation.org
[2]: https://metacpan.org/pod/Syntax::Keyword::PhaserExpression
[3]: https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/;msgid=CAFU%3Dp1nsnVuauwKUTV%2BrPeDXfLkm1_pB6yDmeg3vg7VQHqfAjA%40mail.gmail.com
[4]: https://metacpan.org/pod/B::LintSubs

https://blogs.perl.org/users/psc/2026/02/this-week-in-psc-213-2026-02-02.html