I am finally home from the perl-qa hackathon in Berlin. For me personally I consider this hackathon a huge success. I think many things happened at this hackathon that will propel the perl5 ecosystem forward.

Before diving into details, I want to thank my employer, DreamHost for sponsoring my attendance at the hackathon, they paid for my travel and hotel. DreamHost also went a step further by providing the perl-qa group with a dreamcompute account we were able to use to do smoke testing among other things.

So, what did I accomplish at the hackathon? The simple answer is Test-Simple.

On the first day of the hackathon we had a group discussion related to Test-Simple (Test::Builder, Test::More, etc). This discussion was made up of 3 parts:

1) What from Test-Simple could be improved? If Test-Simple is going to be revamped, what things should change? Who would benefit from these changes? Are the benefits enough to outweigh the risk in changing Test-Simple.

2) Should Test-Simple be modified in-place, or should we start fresh in a new namespace?

3) Does the implementation I have been working on sufficiently address the concerns and issues discussed in #1? Is the implementation sane at a high level? Does anyone have any glaring objections to the Test-Stream design?

We created a nice list of things that needed improvement, and new features we wanted to have, we determined that there were many groups of people that could benefit from change. We discussed the pros and cons of forking into a new namespace, and ultimately decided that changes could go into the existing namespaces. Finally it was determined that at a high level my implementation sounded sane. In the end we produced a punch-list of things that should happen before my implementation could be released.

The punchlist can be found here. Several items have already been completed, but a handful are still outstanding. In addition the right is still reserved to block shipping if anything crazy is discovered during the punch-list process. Ultimately I plan to be patient, and not rush things, even once the punch-list is complete.