At YAPC::EU 2010 in Pisa I received a business card with "Rakudo Star" and the

date July 29, 2010 which was the date of the first release -- a week earlier

with a countdown to 1200 UTC. I still have mine, although it has a tea stain

on it and I refreshed my memory over the holidays by listening again to Patrick

Michaud speaking about the launch of Rakudo Star (R*):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVb6m345J-Q



R* was originally intended as first of a number of distribution releases (as

opposed to a compiler release) -- useable for early adopters but not initially production

Quality. Other names had been considered at the time like Rakudo Beta (rejected as

sounding like "don't use this"!) and amusingly Rakudo Adventure Edition.

Finally it became Rakudo Whatever and Rakudo Star (since * means "whatever"!).

Well over 6 years later and we never did come up with a better name although there

was at least one IRC conversation about it and perhaps "Rakudo Star" is too

well established as a brand at this point anyway. R* is the Rakudo compiler, the main docs, a module installer, some modules and some further docs.

However, one radical change is happening soon and that is a move from panda to

zef as the module installer. Panda has served us well for many years but zef is

both more featureful and more actively maintained. Zef can also install Perl

6 modules off CPAN although the CPAN-side support is in its early days. There

is a zef branch (pull requests welcome!) and a tarball at:

http://pl6anet.org/drop/rakudo-star-2016.12.zef-beta2.tar.gz



Panda has been patched to warn that it will be removed and to advise the use of

zef. Of course anyone who really wants to use panda can reinstall it using zef

anyway.

The modules inside R* haven't changed much in a while. I am considering adding

DateTime::Format (shown by ecosystem stats to be widely used) and

HTTP::UserAgent (probably the best pure perl6 web client library right now).

Maybe some modules should also be removed (although this tends to be more

controversial!). I am also wondering about OpenSSL support (if the library is

available).

p6doc needs some more love as a command line utility since most of the focus

has been on the website docs and in fact some of these changes have impacted

adversely on command line use, eg. under Windows cmd.exe "perl 6" is no longer

correctly displayed by p6doc. I wonder if the website generation code should be

decoupled from the pure docs and p6doc command line (since R* has to ship any

new modules used by the website). p6doc also needs a better and faster search

(using sqlite?). R* also ships some tutorial docs including a PDF generated from perl6intro.com.

We only ship the English one and localisation to other languages could be

useful.

Currently R* is released roughly every three months (unless significant

breakage leads to a bug fix release). Problems tend to happen with the

less widely used systems (Windows and the various BSDs) and also with the

module installers and some modules. R* is useful in spotting these issues

missed by roast. Rakudo itself is still in rapid development. At some point a less frequently

updated distribution (Star LTS or MTS?) will be needed for Linux distribution

packagers and those using R* in production). There are also some question

marks over support for different language versions (6.c and 6.d).

Above all what R* (and Rakudo Perl 6 in general) needs is more people spending

more time working on it! JDFI! Hopefully this blog post might

encourage more people to get involved with github pull requests.

https://github.com/rakudo/star



Feedback, too, in the comments below is actively encouraged.



