I had the honour of being invited to the Perl Toolchain Summit 2017, held in Lyon. It was amazing to meet so many of my Perl heroes, and to work with them on Perl toolchain code for a concentrated few days.

The atmosphere, food, and company were all superb, and the opportunity to brainstorm, collaborate, and agree on things to work on in the future unmissable.

I was able to produce these bits of code:

https://github.com/andk/pause/pull/136 - make PAUSE pass its tests as soon as you "git clone"

https://github.com/ingydotnet/inline-c-pm/pull/63 - making Inline::C pass tests on Windows

https://github.com/Perl-Toolchain-Gang/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/pull/297 - fix a long-standing processPL bug that stopped Acme::CPAN::Testers::UNKNOWN working as designed

https://github.com/Perl-Toolchain-Gang/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/pull/278 - make EUMM work again on AIX

https://github.com/Perl-Toolchain-Gang/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/pull/299 - fix a regression on BSD-style make, and also make the first test of MYEXTLIB

There is still a bug in the test for the last one (it imitates a distro, that won't work right on Windows), but with that out of the way an important new release of ExtUtils::MakeMaker will then be possible. Edit: that is now also addressed in https://github.com/Perl-Toolchain-Gang/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/pull/301.

The hairiest bit of the AIX work, which took up most of the time and brain-sweat, was figuring out why it wasn't working. It was only when I made the wise decision to ask Tux for help that we were able to spot that this error message:

ld: 0711-244 ERROR: No csects or exported symbols have been saved.

was because no object files were being supplied to the linker!

And now, literally a word from our sponsors, without whose generous support this would not have been possible:

Thank you Perl Toolchain Summit 2017 Sponsors