Pugs

Pugscode.org services.

During the past couple months, #perl6 has revamped several pugscode.org services:

Run.pugscode.org

andara++ has updated the popular run-perl6-in-your-browser page to the latest development version, featuring a much more responsive UI via AJAX and mod_perl, and preloaded sessions.

Dev.pugscode.org

A developer-oriented Wiki workspace based on Trac, featuring integrated source tree browser, ticket tracker, as well as devbot6, a new TracBot on #perl6 that announces workspace edits and planet six posts.

Svn.pugscode.org

Pugs's primary repository is now running on Subversion 1.4.2, providing much faster (30%+) turnaround for SVK 2.0 users with its pipelining/ra_replay support. We still have two read-only mirrors at svn.openfoundry.org and svn.perl.org, updated every minute.

Darcs.pugscode.org

Our read-only Darcs mirror is now powered by Tailor, which preserves information on committer and commit messages.  Thanks to proper checkpointing, darcs get --partial http://darcs.pugscode.org/ should be much faster from now on.

Spec.pugscode.org

In addition to the Perl 6 specification (rendered as HTML and annotated by acceptance tests), we now track the rest of pugs/docs/Perl6/ as well.  Also, specbot6 now announces changes to the Perl 6 specifications on #perl6.

Invite.pugscode.org

This is where committers on #perl6 hand out commit bits to new Pugs hackers, powered by CommitBit.  The nickname/password is shared by svn.pugscode.org and dev.pugscode.org.

All services above runs on feather.perl6.nl, the Perl 6 community development server donated and tirelessly maintained by the most excellent Juerd++.  Many kudos!

On a more personal note, I was finally discharged from the hospital today.  There will be a follow-up check in 3 days; if all goes well, that'll be the end of this rather unfortunate episode. Yay!

Run Pugs: a Web terminal for Pugs

You can now play with the latest Pugs via a web terminal: http://run.pugscode.org/

The source code behind it lives in the Pugs repository as misc/runpugs/; more detailed information is available on its info page. Please read the TODO file if you'd like to help out.

Kudos  go to Why's Try Ruby, which inspired runpugs in the first place.   Have fun!

Growing a Planet...

I'm very glad to find that scw, a returning lambdacamel, has started Yet Another Pugs Hacker's Blog to chronicle his ongoing work on Pugs. It will soon join Planet Six, an aggregator on all Perl 6-related blogs -- if you have an Atom/RSS feed on Perl 6-related topics in your journal, or would like to start writing about Perl 6, please leave a comment here and we'll add it to the aggregator.

His current subproject is on a multilevel Parser-bootstrap(Perl 6, parsed with (perl6/p6rules parsed, with (parsec/p6rules, parsed with (minip6, parsed with (perl5/p6rules, parsed with (optable)))))), which will enable maximum sharing of grammar between PIR/Perl5/Haskell implementations.

In other news, the Perl 6 weekly summary, a constant presence on Planet Six, has been absent recently. Today Matt Fowles expressed his wish to pass on the summarizer hat:

Paradoxically, I have found myself wishing that there were summaries as there seems to have been a lot of movement lately and I have not had much time to read it all.

In the hopes of inspiring someone to take my place, I would like to encourage any interested party to just start summarizing and thus become the official perl 6 summarizer.

Thanks, Matt, for all your excellent summaries; I certainly enjoyed them a lot. :-)

So, if you are feeling the spirit of JFDI (pronounced Jifty), then start to backlog and post your first summary to perl6-announce@perl.org!

lighttpd++

Today is again a full $job day.  Thanks to Jesse, I discovered the amazing lighttpd web server (the  equivalent of SQLite of web servers), and promptly hacked Jifty::Script::FastCGI to support it.  These two lines of config worked wonders on a FreeBSD setup, providing such an instaneous feedback that I simply wasn't used to:

server.event-handler = "freebsd-kqueue"
server.stat-cache-engine = "fam"

On another 350mhz AIX machine (on which I can't manage to get mod_perl2 or mod_fastcgi built), the response speed is easily twice that of Jifty's native web server, and the memory footprint is a mere 3mb. Authentication is also made much easier with the builtin FastCGI authorizer.

Much kudos to Jan Kneschke and the lighttpd team for creating this lovely lighty creature. :-)