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SC Notes 2020 07 12

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Todd Rinaldo edited this page Jul 12, 2020 · 10 revisions

Meeting Overview

Details

  • Location: Zoom
  • When: Sunday July 12 2020 at 13:00 UTC

Attendees

Meeting notes

Meeting objectives

  • Validate leadership

  • Decide our governance process

  • Conclusions - what decisons need to be made so that we can move on

  • Next agenda

  • What do we as a team want to make happen?

  • what are our desired outcomes?

What do we want?

Sawyer

  • Have confidence in the plan / leadership so we can progress
    • Doesn't feel that this group has mandate
  • We are sharing conflicting messages

Karl (khw)

  • Confidence in Sawyer's leadership
  • Decision on the 'how'
  • Decision on getting Bleed re-opened

Paul (LeoNerd)

  • Clarification on behalf of Dave
  • Group consensus / knowing what the agreed positions are and who holds them
    • who needs the debates on positions
  • Issues with the mechanisms for discussion
  • Would like more transparencies - community deserves to see what we are saying
  • Can we share these minutes?

H.Merijn Brand (Tux)

  • No conflict - clear on objectives
  • Plan as to who will do what

James (kid51)

  • List of paths of experimentation for v7
    • Help others get involved and share the experience

Nico (atoomic)

  • List the different options, enable discussion
  • Who has what authority to make decisions
    • How can a decision be made?

Todd Rinaldo (toddr)

  • Decide how we decide (governance) - it is nebulous
  • Determine how we decide what to do if key players are unavailable to participate.
  • Determine our values/goals for Perl 7
    • Where do we want to see Perl in 5 years

Our questions

  • How do we make decisions? How can we have mandate, governance

    • Who else may assert

  • Ways of working on Perl 7

  • How do we mange distributions

  • Is /usr/bin/perl7 a fork

    • A fork is when 2 groups go off and develop at the same time.
    • It's a major version bump. The plan is to stop developing Perl 5

  • Conflict between stability and progress

    • How?

  • What is our seccession (voluntary or by bus)

  • Can we make this meeting / outcomes public?

  • Consider Dave's points (Paul)

  • External stakeholders to engage with - how?

    • Gather input for key Perl users
    • Engage with significant developers, influencers

  • Can we rename the github/perl5 repo to github/perl? If so when? (Nicolas)

  • Clarify the communication tools and channels

Answers

Governance

Leader: 🥇Sawyer

Deputy: 🥈Todd Rinaldo (only an interim replacement)

  • Steering committee

    • Design & implementation of the Perl programming language

  • This group is the authority and reponsible for:

    • Being the custodian of the official Perl release
    • Design
    • Development
    • Decisions,
    • Experiment, research
    • Release
    • Roadmap
    • Perl core

  • Out of scope

    • CPAN

  • What is the process to add / remove members?

    • Three supporters, no objections carried - as set up for Perl 4
    • Remove members
      • Request to exit
      • Default expiry one year for inactivity
      • Vote out

  • Purpose: Work out the 'how' together

    • Design & technology authority

  • Responsibilities

    • Public support of the group and members
    • Actively support the leadership
    • Find effective ways to communicate with peers
    • Understand the meeting etiquette

The Perl Steering Committee members

  • Sawyer
  • Paul Evans
  • Todd Rinaldo
  • H.Merijn Brand
  • James E Keenan
  • Karl Williamson
  • Nicolas Rochelemagne
  • Yves Orton
  • Leon Timmermans
  • Dave Mitchell
  • Aaron Crane
  • Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker
  • Hugo van der Sanden
  • Tony Cook
  • Steve Hay

What does the committee want to make happen over time?

Paul

  • Feature parity
  • Bring language up to date

Tux

  • Perl - the favorite language of everybody again

James

  • Same as Tux
  • Make the perl core test suite perl 7 compliant

Todd

  • See 7.0.0 released
    • define a plan
    • Move the language forward
  • Start making 8 awesome as 7.1.x

Sawyer

  • Get Perl out of stagnation
  • Make it easier to add the features as default
  • Better documentation
  • Make it the language I want to write in

Karl

  • Get clarity in the short term
  • Development process
  • Make decisions around 7

Nicolas

  • Get 7.0
  • Get the energy to move forward
  • Avoid getting stuck

Committee viewpoints on Perl 7

See also Perceived Positions on Perl 7 where we are attempting to aggregate people's positions on the Plan for Perl 7.

Tux (H. Merijn Brand)

  • The proposal from Sawyer (the original proposal?) is the only option.
  • No energy/time to make it happen, but very willing to help
  • Not everything will break
    • Tested with new Perl 7 candidates
    • Differences not that much
    • Most of CPAN will work, edge case isues

James

  • Supports Sawyer's vision

  • New code should be Perl 7 by default

  • Should not promise interop, but should provide a lot of interop

  • The people doing the work get to decide the how

  • Progress being made toward a version of Perl 7 with Nicolas

  • Would benefit from volunteer developers (who are subscribed to the vision)

  • Ideas to discuss around development processes

  • Inaccurate to characterise as a fork, it is a major version upgrade

  • /usr/bin/perl can point to v5 for several years

Todd

  • A new major version should be allowed to break stuff.
  • /usr/bin/perl7 (with new defaults) along side /usr/bin/perl5 seems sane and distros know how to handle multiple versions of the language.
    • This is not the first time this has been done.
  • Module::Compatibility will auto-inject use p5 into CPAN installed modules unless 'use v7' is seen.

LeoNerd (Paul Evans)

  • Switch to V7 is good idea

  • Adding 'use v7' is welcome

  • Does not support breaking existing code or CPAN

    • Users not warned about change

  • Perl 5 or Perl 7 - fork

    • Divided the community
      • not that I'm saying that this currently is a fork (I do not believe it is currently); but simply that if we aren't careful with how we manage things we may end up with a true fork; with different people maintaining 5 vs. pushing 7 forward.

  • The issue is that all current code may fail

  • Further proposal

    • Perl provides warnings to authors requesting that they 'use version' so it is not a breaking change
    • PAUSE/CPAN should warn the author at upload time that they are missing 'use version'

  • Put out a v7 without the changes, add them to Perl 8

Karl

  • Use warnings / strict should be default
  • Issue is not 'if' but 'when'
  • v7 should be back compat unless use v7 explicit
  • Maybe have 1 year notice for the changes
  • Either don't break, or give notice of breakage

Nicolas

  • Wants to see the changes to the defaults in v7

  • Hard to get Toolchain & language together

  • Address CPAN compatibility issues later

  • exchange with toolchain to find the best option

  • provide patches to upstream cpan distribution

  • if needed provide a fork of the distro p7-*

Sawyer

  • This is not a fork, it is a new major version
  • Perl 6 is a different case
  • 'use version' is becoming the focus, it shouldn't
    • There may be other ways
    • The issue is the defaults
  • We need to find better ways to work together
  • Some positions are to make zero changes
  • Over-sharing may be damaging

Next meeting agenda

When: Tuesday, July 14, 2020 at 19:00:00 GMT Where: Zoom

Primary objectives

  • How Perl 7
  • Make a plan to open blead
  • Plan next meeting objectives

Further agenda points

  • James
    • proposal for future release process
    • How can this change in future, be more flexible
    • James has created proposal document

https://metacpan.org/release/perl

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