October 2007 Archives
File::Path, a core Perl module for creating and deleting directory trees, is now dual-lifed. This means it's part of the Perl core, and it's also released on CPAN separately, so updates can happen in the module without waiting for Perl releases. David Landgren is the maintainer of the CPAN-based distribution.
The latest version is 2.02, and recent changes include:
- security vulnerability due to a race condition fixed
- compatible across all versions from 5.005 to 5.10.0
- new modern API style introduced (the old API still works)
- new "keep_root" functionality added (to remove everthing with a directory but leaving the directory itself intact.
- a better test suite and a documentation rewrite
Module::Starter 1.44 has been released, and it's been a long time coming. Module::Starter makes it trivial to start a new CPAN distribution, without having to create the parts from memory from scratch, or cutting & pasting from an existing module. Where the standard h2xs tool that ships with Perl creates the .pm file for you, Module::Starter creates an entire distribution.
In the two years since the last non-developer release, features added include:
- Improved support for Perl::Critic
- Now easier to build your own Module::Starter extensions
- Support for Module::Install
- Improved test suite
Thanks to Ricardo Signes for picking up my slack on this. Although I originally wrote Module::Starter, it's more Ricardo's work than mine at this point.
Andy Armstrong has released String::Smart, which provides some syntactic sugar and magic to make strings that translate themselves into various encoding forms, so you can easily switch between HTML encodings and SQL escaping and so on. Strings encoded as HTML encoded know that fact, and can de-encode themselves behind the scenes, for example.
Not sure I like the interface, but there's some cool ideas running around there.
