

shlomif_tech

[ shlomif ]

After my last post about File::Find alternatives, chromatic responded, and said that it was opinion that the core should not be bloated further and that he would prefer if File::Find did not exist in the core in the first place. I brought the relevant links on perl5-porters, and David Cantrell wrote a patch to add a warning to File::Find, while disabling it from all the places in the core that use this module. As other people noted, we should practice what we preach, and so if we decide that File::Find is deprecated, then we should include a different alternative in the core, and adapt all the existing code to make use of it instead. Someone even suggested implementing File::Find in terms of the new module. Eventually, I realised that the best solution would be to include a note in the File::Find documentation about its limitations, and refer the interested people to the better alternatives on CPAN. In any case, since my "Shavin' Another Second" post, I implemented several more small optimisations (and general code cleanups) to File-Find-Object, and it now takes about 27 seconds to run in my test run. One thing that surprised me was the fact that after a relatively large optimisation and overhaul to the code, all the tests pass immediately after the first clean run. Usually, the code required more persuasion to make it work. I also began File-Find-Object-Rule, which is the File-Find-Object-enabled-fork of File-Find-Rule, which provides a more convenient interface above File::Find. The first release of F-F-O-R had missing dependencies, and so consistently failed all CPAN testers' reports. Version 0.0101 was better, but its tests failed on MS-Windows, due to the fact that the File-Find-Rule tests excepted UNIXish paths (which File::Find happily provided, but File-Find-Object doesn't). This was fixed in File-Find-Object-Rule version 0.0200. Version 0.0200 is still a mostly "smallest-effort" port of File-Find-Rule, so now comes the interesting part of truly making use of File-Find-Object's advantages, which may involve extending the latter API. I also would like to create a documented API for File-Find-Object-Rule, so the code won't be tightly coupled with File-Find-Object. Speaking of File-Find-Rule, you may find this recent discussion on use.perl.org interesting. Except for that I also did some work on XML::RSS, like integrating some patches that someone else sent me, doing QA, and answering an email someone sent about one of its limitations (which I'd like to fix.). I also found a bug in ack, and submitted a patch fixing it. Finally, after my home-site's remote repository good condition was restored, I decided to try to build it from scratch and correct the process that has gathered a lot of rot since I last did it. I discovered a lot of problems with installing the necessary CPAN modules that I wrote in part for the homepage, but I'm waiting on a reply to this question about Module-Build on its mailing list, before I can correct the build.