Paul Johnson

This weekend I was once again privileged to attend the Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS). This year it was held in the lovely city of Leipzig.

The PTS continues to be my favourite technical event of the year. In part this is because I get to meet old friends and make new ones, but it's also because the summit really serves its purpose and I am able to make so much progress on the projects I have which belong in Perl's toolchain ecosystem.

PTS isn't a conference - it's a four-day working meeting. It brings together people working on toolchain projects to solve common problems and push the work forward. I did get a lot of work done, but that's not the main focus, for me anyway. I see it as a time to solve problems and plan the way forward, and for me PTS facilitates that in the most wonderful fashion.

Numerous times after hitting a problem or having some question I was able to walk a few feet to the person in the world best qualified to solve the problem or answer the question. And a number of folk also came to me with questions or reported problems so I hope I was able to help in a similar way.

So, in terms of results, I:

• Made three Devel::Cover releases
• Fixed Devel::Cover to work with 5.42.0 (to be)
• Discovered and reported a perl problem during Devel::Cover testing (missing ^^= operator)
• Got cpancover.com working on btrfs with compression to allow more coverage reports on the server.
• Merged in all outstanding Devel::Cover PRs
• Closed out a few tickets

But beyond that I was able to have chats with various people and groups regarding all sorts of areas touching on coverage, testing, hosting, the perl core, build systems and various other adjacent topics. And this was the real value of the event. I came with a list of things to work on, knowing I wouldn't be able to do all of them. And whilst I worked on several topics I had planned, and especially the most important ones, I ended up not touching others and moving some in other directions based on discussions with people who understand things better than I.

In particular I want to call out Ferenc Erki for suggesting that the solution to my problem of running out of disk space for cpancover reports was not anything I was considering, but rather migrating to a filesystem which implements transparent compression, and then helping me implement that. I'm still playing with the small details, but this should solve that particular problem for a good few years.

And to give just one example of the value in bringing folk together, I was looking through some recent Devel::Cover tickets and noticed one related to using Devel::Cover with Module::Build::Tiny. I had previously put that to one side because it didn't mean much to me. But Leon Timmermans was sitting almost next to me and so I showed him the bug report. He immediately identified the problem and showed me a ticket and PR he had created a while back to implement the solution, but he hadn't had a use case and so he wasn't sure whether or not to merge it. Well, now Devel::Cover provided the use case and so we have two previously ignored tickets now referencing each other and a solution ready to go.

Part of the reason that this year I worked on areas I hadn't initially expected was because we were missing a few folk who regularly attend PTS. For some this was due to other commitments. For some the reason was more sad.

But this allowed a number of folk to attend for the first time. And this not only enhanced the summit itself, but hopefully will be of benefit to the Perl toolchain in general over the years.

PTS would not be possible without a considerable amount of support from many people. Obviously this includes the folk who give up their time to attend. But I'd also like to recognise Salve, who kicked the whole thing off, the organisers of every QAH/PTS since then for keeping the torch burning and, if I may mix my metaphors even further, the organisers of this year's event for knocking the ball out of the park. Big thanks to

• Daniel Böhmer, local organiser and Leipzig tour guide extraordinaire
• Tina Müller, local(ish) organiser
• Philippe Bruhat, organiser
• Breno de Oliveira, organiser
• Laurent Boivin, finances

Monetary Sponsors

Booking.com, WebPros, CosmoShop, Datensegler, OpenCage, SUSE, Simplelists Ltd, Ctrl O Ltd, Findus Internet-OPAC, plusW GmbH

In-kind sponsors

Grant Street Group, Fastmail, shift2, Oleeo, Ferenc Erki

Community Sponsors

The Perl and Raku Foundation, Japan Perl Association, Harald Joerg, Alexandros Karelas PerlModules.net, Matthew Persico, Michele Beltrame Sigmafin, Rob Hall, Joel Roth, Richard Leach, Jonathan Kean, Richard Loveland, Bojan Ramsa