This page has now been archived. Please submit any new tasks to this page by Nov 27.

GCI Task Ideas

The Perl community is so huge and diverse that no one person or small group of persons could possibly come up with one list of tasks, so we need your help.

Adding Tasks

Please add your suggestions for tasks that our students could undertake at the appropriate point on this page.

Here are the categories for which we need tasks.

• Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code;
• Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents;
• Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing;
• Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality;
• Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions;
• Training: Tasks related to helping others learn more;
• Translation: Tasks related to localization;
• User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction;

However, do keep in mind that the Google Code-in is a program for students of age 13 to 17. Proposing tasks of the complexity you'd normally have during the Google Summer of Code will be too complex and unwieldy.

The tasks we're looking for need to be able to be completed within a few hours to a few days by young students, often without much practical experience in working with the free software community. The duration given should be the elapsed time. Please reckon on students being able to work between two and three hours per day, but don't give any durations of less than two days. Ideally tasks should take less than four days. If the task is larger than this, see if it could be broken up into smaller tasks. Once a student claims a task they have that much time in which to complete it. If they do not do so, the task becomes available for another student to claim.

The are some examples of tasks on the main page. Some tasks may require close mentoring whereas others could be left for the student to complete reasonably easily with only moderate supervising.

Gnome's How to write a good task.

Signing up as a Mentor

If you are willing to sign up as a mentor, please edit the mentors page.

Reminder

When the time comes near to assign tasks, pull from the Test::More issue tracker. Do not pull before hand as that list is changing rapidly. In particular issues with the "Gardening", "Easy" and "Docs" labels. Please leave a comment on the issue that it has been made available via GCI so somebody else doesn't do it.

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Code

Tasks related to writing or refactoring code.

Low Difficulty

Test the MetaCPAN codebase with the latest CPAN toolchain

Duration: 2 days

MetaCPAN currently runs on slightly outdated versions of its CPAN dependencies. We'd like to upgrade, but we're not quite sure if anything would still work if we upgraded.

This tasks involves getting a fresh installation of perl 5.14.2, installing all the MetaCPAN dependencies from CPAN, reporting all test failures in them, and running the MetaCPAN frontend and backend on it to make sure the basic functionality is still working and all its tests pass .

perl5i: Fix "Easy" perl5i code issues

Duration: 2 - 3 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

perl5i has a list of easy issues which can be done. Some are fairly trivial, some require a bit of work, and some require discussion.

Despite its magic, adding a perl5i feature is usually a matter of normal Perl programming.

This is a meta-task. The specific tasks are described individually.

perl5i: Remove autobox fixes which exist in autobox::Core

Duration: 2 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

perl5i has had to fix a number of methods from autobox::Core. A lot of these have since been fixed in autobox::Core.

Check if our fixes have been fixed upstream and if so remove them. Make sure we depend on a high enough version of autobox::Core.

If one of our fixes hasn't been pushed upstream, consider reporting it to autobox::Core and maybe patch it.

perl5i: Method to turn an array into a hash

Duration: 2 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

I write this a lot:

my %hash = map { $_ => 1 } @array;

Usually because I want to check if there's an element in @array a lot.

So my %hash = @array->as_hash seems sensible. Should it do anything else?

perl5i: Multi pop/shift

Duration: 2 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

Popping or shifting multiple items off an array is a pita. Either you have to figure out how to use splice to do it, or use a for loop.

Make a pop and shift that take the number of things to pop off.

Issue: pop() returns a scalar. @array->pop(3); should return an array or array ref. Does this mean we modify @array->pop so it returns an array if there's an argument? Or do we write popn? I lean towards popn/shiftn.

perl5i: Array->rotate

Duration: 2 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

Thinking of an array of strings as rows and columns, flip the columns and rows. So:

my @rows = ("AAA", "BBB", "123"); my @columns = @rows->rotate; # ("AB1", "AB2", "AB3");

Short rows are filled in with spaces, possible configurable option.

my @rows = ("A", "BBB", "1234"); my @columns = @rows->rotate; # ("AB1", " B2", " B3", " 4");

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3206720/perl-hash-of-hash-and-columns/3206871#3206871 for inspiration.

perl5i: ARRAY/HASH->pick to get a random element

Duration: 2 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

Pick N random elements out of a list or hash (in which case its the yet to be defined Pair). Modeled on Perl 6's pick. http://svn.pugscode.org/pugs/docs/Perl6/Spec/S32-setting-library/Containers.pod

method pick ( Int $number = 1 )

pick guarantees not to return the same element twice in a single call.

What should it return? If you just want to pick one it seems silly to return a list or array ref. But I don't want to make an exception for where $number = 1. Maybe $item = @array->pick_one.

If $number is greater than the size of the list, it returns the entire list, shuffled. $number = 0 returns an empty list.

perl5i: /usr/bin/perl5i1

Duration: 2 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

pjf suggests that we ship a perl5i1 binary to match perl5i::1 (and perl5i2 to match perl5i2, etc...).

The perl5i binary is mostly for one-liners, using it in the #! line is half a joke, but I don't see why not.

perl5i: Better $SIG{DIE}

Duration: 2 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

$SIG{DIE} has a major flaw, it triggers on eval. To get it right your DIE handler should return if $^S is set.

So write our own that does that. How? Make $DIE a tied global which you can set to a code ref, just like $SIG{DIE}, but it return if $^S is set. Ta da!

Throw in $WARN for consistency.

perl5i: Add methods to work with overloading

Duration: 2 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

overload.pm has three functions which would be handy in Object.

my $is_overloaded = $object->is_overloaded(); Returns true if the object is overloaded, false otherwise. Just overloaded::Overloaded().

my $code = $object->is_overloaded($op); Returns the method which implements $op, if its overloaded. False otherwise. overload::Method()

And a method to return the string value of the object in the absence of overloading. overload::StrVal(). Don't know what the method should be.

Make Data::Dumper optionally stop Dumper from using each()

Duration: 4 days

Mentor: msouth@gmail.com

Currently, Data::Dumper's dump() subroutine uses perl's "each" to iterate over the thing it's dumping. This can cause problems if you are each()ing over a hashref and you dump the hashref while you're each()ing over it, leading to an infinite loop.

A variable like the other ones Dumper uses to control its functionality (such as $Data::Dumper::Purity) should be created (and method-settable like the current ones, e.g. $d->Purity(1)), possibly called "Noeach" (?) which would iterate via a call to keys() rather than each()ing.

JSON formatter for Test::Builder 1.5

Duration: 2 days

Mentor: schwern@pobox.com

Test::Builder 1.5 is a major internals rewrite of the framework which powers almost all the Perl testing modules.

Using the new formatters available in Test::Builder 1.5, write a formatter to output test events as a list of JSON objects. This will both be useful for debugging and as a format which is easy to parse and loses no information.

It's also good practice for writing more formatters.

Medium Difficulty

Add the bug count of distributions to the MetaCPAN index

Duration: 2 days

On the distribution overview pages, such as https://metacpan.org/release/Moose, you can find a nice overview of metadata about the distribution, such as the number of ratings and the average rating.

There's also a link to the distribution's bugtracker.

Most CPAN distributions use http://rt.cpan.org/ to track their bugs. rt.cpan.org provides a summary of bug reports for each distribution.

It'd be nice to have that overview of open bugs for a distribution displayed right next to the bugs link on the overview page.

For that to happen, we first need to collect that data into the MetaCPAN index, which is the goal of this task.

See https://github.com/CPAN-API/metacpan-web/issues/291 for details.

Show files/code of packages on OPAR

Duration: 3 days

Mentor: Renee Baecker

OPAR is the "OTRS Package ARchive" a public package repository for OTRS, the help desk software written in Perl.

Currently the user has no chance to see the code until he downloads the package from OPAR.

The goal of this task is to get filenames and code from files in the package, and create a webpage where the files and the code is shown.

Help implement Dancer2 core engines

Duration: 4 days

Dancer2 is a rewrite from scratch of Dancer, a web framework. Dancer2 does not yet include the full range of session/template/logging engines available for Dancer (wrappers providing support for different templating engines, different logging methods, different ways to store sessions, etc). Port over/rewrite the missing ones.

JUnit formatter for Test::Builder 1.5

Duration: 2 days

Mentor: schwern@pobox.com

Test::Builder 1.5 is a major internals rewrite of the framework which powers all the Perl testing modules.

Jenkins (formerly known as Hudson) is a very popular continuous testing tool. It prefers to read test output in the XML format used by JUnit. Perl tests output in a format called TAP (Test Anything Protocol) and numerous shims are needed for it to talk to be understood by Jenkins.

Using the new formatters available in Test::Builder 1.5, write a formatter to output the XML required for JUnit.

It is recommended that the much simpler JSON formatter be tackled first.

perl5i: no multidimensional

Duration: 3 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

Disable the old school multidimensional hash emulation which now serves as a trap.

Implement with "no multidimensional". http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?multidimensional

This will make existing code incompatible and so needs a major version bump.

See #175 for previous discussion.

perl5i: Add no multidimensional; no stringification; no bareword::filehandles

Duration: 3 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

Same idea as the pragmas autovivification, indirect.

perl5i: Make all autoboxed functions which return a list act consistently

Duration: 3 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

The general pattern of autoboxed methods which return lists is to return an array ref in scalar context and an array in list context. They don't all do that, especially things which come from autobox::Core.

map and grep have been altered. Candidates include sort().

Alternatively, fix it in autobox::Core. schwern has a release bit on that, apparently.

perl5i: A better AUTOLOAD

Duration: 2 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

The way one writes AUTOLOAD sucks. Particularly having to parse out $AUTOLOAD.

Implement method_does_not_exist() to replace AUTOLOAD(). It can be implemented by writing Object::AUTOLOAD() which calls method_does_not_exist(). The critical difference being that we want to provide the package and method name without having to parse it out. This should be stored in a message object. This can either be passed into method_does_not_exist() or supplied as a global. I'm leaning towards passed in as it avoids having to declare the magic global.

Here's an example of an automatic accessor.

sub method_does_not_exist { my $self = shift; my $msg = shift; my $name = $msg->name; # the method name, without the package qualifier

if( @_ ) {
    $self->{$name} = shift;
}
return $self->{$name};

}

High Difficulty

Move a module out of the lib/ directory and into ext/, dist/, or cpan/ in the Perl core

Duration: 2 days

Historically, all modules bundled with the Perl Core have been located in the lib/ directory. That made keeping them in sync with their CPAN versions or getting them released onto CPAN in the first place very hard.

In recent years, the Perl Porters have been working on moving a lot of code out of the lib/ directory, and into distribution directories under either ext/, dist/, or cpan/, depending on whether the module is maintained in the core only, in the core but also available on CPAN, or on CPAN and merely synced to the core, respectively.

There's still some leftovers in lib/, some of which are easy to move to the new layout, some of which are harder.

Pick any of those modules and move them to the appropriate new directory while keeping both the build system and the tests working.

Make http://mojolicio.us/ more magical

Duration: 3 days

On the frontpage of our site (http://mojolicio.us), there's a neat vector artwork by SRI showing a cloud going into a unicorn box. This artwork also has some binary trees on it. We suggest that you try to implement the artwork dynamically to make a unique tree for each recent visitor to mojolicio.us, using the real time capabilities of the Mojolicious framework.

Implement creative usages of Net::COLOURlovers

Duration: 3 days

Mentor: Alan Haggai Alavi (alanhaggai@alanhaggai.org)

This task is related to the previous one. Implement example creative usages in code. For the designer clothing example (from the previous task), implement a website that features clothing, the colours and patterns of which can be customised easily. Any creative implementation (not necessarily the one stated above) is welcome.

Implement Ubic::Service::MooseX::Daemonize

Duration: 3 days

We want to support as many alternative daemonization backends as possible. MooseX::Daemonize is one of them. You'll have to adapt MooseX::Daemonize API to Ubic::Service base service class API and check that it works. You can upload it on CPAN yourself, but this part of task is optional and won't be required.

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Documentation

Tasks related to creating/editing documents.

Low Difficulty

Update Net::COLOURlovers documentation

Duration: 2 days

Mentor: Alan Haggai Alavi (alanhaggai@alanhaggai.org)

Currently the documentation looks like an API methods list. Describe each method (possibly) and add example usage.

Fix a perl5i documentation issue

Duration: 2 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

perl5i could use some documentation work, including restructuring the main documentation and making POD tags consistent.

See the list of documentation issues.

Document methods implemented by autobox::Core

Duration: 2 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

perl5i gets a lot of functionality from autobox::Core. autobox::Core has a lot of undocumented methods.

Document the undocumented autobox::Core methods. Do this work in autobox::Core, not perl5i.

If you're feeling ambitious, the documentation could overall be made more consistent.

Improve Dancer documentation

Duration: 2 days

Read through the Dancer documentation from the point of view of a new user unaccustomed to the framework, and suggest improvements (clarifications, additional new-user tips, etc).

Write and publish a Perl language overview

Duration: 3 days

Suggested mentor: richard.foley@rfi.net

Read through the online Perl documentation and write a one-page overview which describes the current state of perl-5, perl5i, strawberry-perl, perl-6, rakudo, bla bla bla. Which are production-ready, which development only, where to find more info, etc. A sort of "don't be confused" page, "look here".

Medium Difficulty

Ideas for creative usage of Net::COLOURlovers

Duration: 2 days

Mentor: Alan Haggai Alavi (alanhaggai@alanhaggai.org)

Document possible creative usages of the module. For example: The sample page for the module can be used by designers to select random colours and patterns; maybe for making designer clothing. There certainly are many more ideas. Document them.

perl5i: Rewrite perlfaq entries with perl5i

Duration: 2 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

All too often, simple questions have complicated answers in Perl. Easy things are not as easy as they should be. perl5i tries to make easy things easy, and let simple questions have simple answers.

1. Find a question in the perlfaq whose answer is too complicated.

2. Determine if it would be made simpler by using perl5i.

3. Rewrite the answer using perl5i.

4. Add it to the perl5ifaq.

In addition, you might come upon things which perl5i doesn't make easier but could. Please report that and consider writing up a new feature.

Add pod documentation to the Devel-Trepan .pm files

Duration: 4 days

Mentor: Shlomi Fish

Devel-Trepan is an enhanced and usable debugger for Perl 5. It is more gdb-like and contains an extensive API.

Currently most lib/*/.pm files lack POD documentation. This task will add POD to them and bring them closer to full POD coverage. It will also involve prefixing methods for internal use with underscores.

SpamAssassin Anti-Spam and Email Compendium

Duration: 4 days

We have written a compendium of various topics as a crash course for administrators and technical people looking to learn more about anti-spam. It builds on http://spamassassin.apache.org/presentations/macsysadmin_2009_presentation_final_post.pdf and could use edits and reviews of existing edits to prepare a document for publication on SA's wiki. It will also be an excellent introduction to anti-Spam.

Prefer done_testing() in the Test::More documentation

Duration: 2 days

Mentor: schwern@pobox.com

done_testing() is a feature which greatly simplifies test plan management. There is now no reason to use no_plan and few reasons to use use Test::More tests => 123.

Rewrite the documentation to prefer done_testing() over no_plan or a static number of tests at the start.

Update the perlfaq to use Web::Simple instead of CGI.pm

Duration: 2 days

Mentor: c.nehren@shadowcat.co.uk

The Web programming parts of the perlfaq (specifically, perlfaq9) are showing their age. They were written when CGI.pm was all we had, and it reflects poorly on Perl that we still point people to writing Web code this way today.

This task involves grokking how the CGI.pm examples in the perlfaq work, learning Web::Simple and Plack well enough to write equivalent code, and then updating the docs with that code and corresponding walkthroughs.

Write Catalyst Advent Calendar Articles

Duration: 24 days

Mentor: dhoss@cpan.org

Every year the Catalyst development team gets people to write articles about the cool things they've done using Catalyst. Every year it can be a bit of a rush and struggle to get each slot filled. We need volunteers to write articles (maybe a few each, so we get every slot filled) on new and fun and useful things they've done with their Catalyst codebase and apps in the past year.

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Outreach

Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing.

Medium Difficulty

Perl Tutorial Evaluation

There are many Perl tutorials available online. Not all of them are of the quality from which we would like beginners to learn.

Gather a list of such sites and provide a rough ranking of each in terms of usefulness, depth, freshness and any other useful criteria.

The Perl community can use that list to promote sites useful to beginners, and to ask owners of less useful sites to update their content or link outwards.

A website for this purpose has been set up at perl-tutorial.org. A list of possible tasks to be done on there:

• improve the site design, make it more slick and shiny
• go through the list of uncurated tutorials and add them to the tables
• find other tutorials on the web
• reach out to the tutorial authors and ask them to update the site when they update the tutorials
• maybe make detail pages for the tutorials themselves

Inspired by this blog post.

Porting Dancer plugins to Dancer2

Duration: 3 days

Whilst Dancer2 is striving for backwards compatibility, some existing plugins on CPAN may require minor changes, especially if they do anything lower-level with the core of Dancer. Identify plugins which require changes, and submit required changes to the author for inclusion.

Creating a web design and other UI elements for Dwim Perl

Duration: 5 days

Suggested mentor: Gabor Szabo

Dwim Perl is a Perl distribution (currently only for Windows) that is built upon the Strawberry Perl distribution. It had a few releases under various names (e.g. Padre on Strawberry) and (Strawberry with Cream) but now we are moving away from those names. The new name will be Dwim Perl. We need help in creating the web site (the one currently was created only to provide some context and some content). including description of the content in this package. We will also need a few icons to be used during installation and on the desktop.

Help out on the SpamAssassin mailing list

Duration: 3 days

The mailing list for Users is always in need of people to lend a hand to new administrators running SpamAssassin. Fighting Anti-Spam is complex and requires a good knowledge of many technologies, RFCs, acronyms and more.

High Difficulty

Creating a report of the "most interesting CPAN uploads"

Duration: 3 days

Suggested mentor: Gabor Szabo

It would very useful for people to be able to watch what are the most interesting recent uploads to CPAN. This can be used by anyone, including the Perl Weekly to let people know what to check out. What consists "most interesting" is of course debatable but here is what we would need: An open source perl script that would give a list of the CPAN modules uploaded in the last N days (N = 7)

• Pick the most popular modules (based on +-es on MetaCPAN) that have a new release.

• Pick the modules that most other modules rely on. ( similar to, or based on the Volatile 100 of Adam Kennedy http://ali.as/top100/index.html or by fetching the data from MetaCPAN )

• Pick distributions where the distribution size changed the most (or relatively the most)

• Pick distributions where the change diff is the largest in percentage of distribution size.

• Pick the modules that did not have a new version for a long time but now they have one.

• Pick modules that are new to CPAN

It should be written in a way that it can be later integrated in MetaCPAN or elsewhere.

The Organisers Aid

Duration: 6 days

There are a growing number of sources of information from Blogs, to websites, to news outlets, to Twitter/Facebook and other social media sites along with Perl News and Perl Weekly, also there are usergroups and newsletters. An effort is being made to consolidate this information for easy distribution, a long way has been reached with Gabor's Perl Weekly.

This task is to further discover how to make the Organisers' aid, a way of sifting and consolidating the information using rss/atom and import filters to make a collated list that Perl Community leaders can use to further disseminate and pass on information.

There is no clear solution so the student will have to assess the current level of activity. Calculate the best manner in which to gather the information (need not create this element just determine the best way). Decide how that information can be analysed and displayed. Create a plan for implementing this.

This task is to create the initial structure for a project outline, identifying the issues, the technology and organisation so that a further project can be made.

More than one community member will have input and guidance and the Mentor will have at least one back-up mentor as this covers a vast area of expertise.

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Quality Assurance

Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality.

General

Perl has two main bug trackers. rt.perl.org for core bugs and rt.cpan.org for bugs in cpan modules. We have some specific QA tasks listed here, and we will add more, and we will also be able to make a selection of tasks from RT available to students as required, along with appropriate mentors.

Medium Difficulty

Synchronise a core module with CPAN

Duration: 4 days

Many of the modules bundled with the Perl Core are also available separately from CPAN and merely synched between the two.

That sometimes ends up with the two sources diverging slightly, which can be a huge hindrance for maintenance.

Use the Porting/core-cpan-diff tool provided in the core to locate a Module with a divergence between the core and CPAN, and try to get them back into sync, either by working towards getting changes in the core included in the CPAN version, or by integrating changes originating from CPAN back into the core.

Suggested modules:

• Tie::File (core: 0.97, CPAN: 0.96 (broken))

Test and improve Dancer2 backwards compatibility

Duration: 3 days

Dancer2 is a rewrite from scratch of the Dancer framework, whilst maintaining the same DSL and providing backwards compatibility. Help test for backwards compatibility and fix any problems found.

perlformance.net: Polish build scripts

Duration: 4 days.

Mentor: Steffen Schwigon

The perlformance scripts which build Perl from git, install dependencies from CPAN and run a benchmark suite need a little polish.

Get to know perl's build process from the existing scripts and understand CPAN details including the distroprefs mechanism. Then ensure the scripts work over multiple releass of perl, from 5.8.0 up to the current 5.14.2 release.

perlformance.net: Benchmark::Perl::Formance

Duration: 3 days.

Mentor: Steffen Schwigon

The Benchmark::Perl::Formance module needs some work to ensure it sends correct results in all its TAP output.

TAP is the Test Anything Protocol which is used in Perl and other projects to describe test output. #

High Difficulty

Prepare first 100% open-source public release of LunapCMS

Duration: 7 days

Suggested mentor: kevin.mcgrail-enlightenedperl@pccc.com

The LunpaCMS project is a CMS written in Perl. Unlike many CMS projects, it is designed to provide a flexible framework with a "version-less" deployment that aims to support many sites with a single installation per server that is upgradeable with a simple svn update command.

The project has powered a number of projects for publicly-traded firms and has been in live-use for well over a decade. It was always intended to be open-source, however, it has never been released formally due to contractual obligations and the quagmire of licensing issues (we renamed it from PerlCMS, for example).

We would like to finish the goal of releasing this for the good of the Perl programming public but need more pairs of eyes in reviewing the code for release.

We would especially like someone to install, review the SQL queries, attempt injection attacks, make sure all web-based input is sanitized well, and generally try and ensure that it's ready to switch from obscurity to public without endangering sites that use it.

Fix SpamAssassin bugs

Duration: 3 days

Suggested mentor: kevin.mcgrail-enlightenedperl@pccc.com

We are always looking for people to review open bugs at https://issues.apache.org/SpamAssassin/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance desc&bug_status=open and pick something that interests them.

Audit the Perl core for unused lexical variables

Duration: 6 days

Come up with an automated way of finding unused lexical variables in the Perl core. Test::Vars, Perl::Critic and warnings::unused might be helpful for this.

The aim is to provide instructions to a human auditor, not to automate the cleanup.

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Research

Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions.

Low Difficulty

Investigate the viability of including Unicode::GCString in the Perl core

Duration: 5 days

On the Perl 5 Porters list, there have been discussions about including the Unicode::GCString module from CPAN in the Perl core.

In order for that to happen, we need to find out what the possible implications might be, including, but not limited to, the current portability of the module and, if it isn't as portable as the core right now, what needs to be done to make it so, and the author's opinion on the inclusion.

perl5i: Methods to weaken a reference

Duration: 3 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

Add $ref->weaken and $ref->is_weak as wrappers around Scalar::Util. Mostly because Chip held weaken() up as a silly use of OO and it turns out its a really good one. :)

Trouble is, the autobox interface doesn't provide us with a way to tell the difference between @array->weaken and $array->weaken. I'm happy with it just being a "don't do that".

perl5i: Use 5.12 "unicode_strings" feature

Duration: 2 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

rjbs says there's pretty much no reason not to use the 5.12 "unicode_strings" feature, so maybe we should use it on 5.12. I haven't evaluated it, but rjbs is usually right.

Medium Difficulty

Make the MediaWiki::Bot test suite more robust

Duration: 2 days

mentor: Mike Doherty

Currently, the test suite for MediaWiki::Bot is failing, and it isn't clear whether this is caused by an error with the wiki the test suite uses, a bug in the test suite, or a bug in the module. This project involves determining where the errors are, and possibly fixing them.

Make Ubic compatible with Solaris

Duration: 2 days

Test suite for Ubic is failing on Solaris because some kind of incompatibility of Solaris's ps command with POSIX. You'll have to install Solaris in vmware (or other virtualization software), figure out what's wrong and fix it. Benefits: we'll be able to claim that Ubic works on all *nix systems. Requirements: experience with vmware and *nix systems will help, but completely optional.

perl5i: Steal from Moose::Autobox

Duration: 3 days

Suggested mentor: schwern@pobox.com

Look through it for good ideas. Glancing through it...

@A->tail($how_many); %h->hslice(@Keys);

Maybe stuff in Moose::Autobox::CODE if you can figure out what it does.

High Difficulty

SpamAssassin Website Migration

Duration: 6 days

Suggested mentor: kevin.mcgrail-enlightenedperl@pccc.com

The website for the project does not currently use the ASF Website infrastructure - See http://www.apache.org/dev/cms.html Reading this documentation and reviewing the current website code to identify tasks to achieve the switch over would be ideal.

Investigate the possibility of declaring conflicting dependencies for CPAN modules

Duration: 7 days

Currently the CPAN toolchain doesn't really support any kind of dependency other than '>= VERSION'. Specifically, there's no way to declare that one module changed incompatibly and that it will break certain other modules that might already be installed, or that these modules need to be upgraded to a certain version after installing the breaking module.

Module authors came up with several workarounds for this issue, but none of them seem be adopted widely or actually fix this issue for users.

Investigate what it'd take to make our module toolchain handle these kinds of updates in a more user-friendly way.

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Training

Tasks related to helping others learn more.

Low Difficulty

Create a Catalyst Cheat Sheet

Duration: 3 days

Catalyst has quite a big API, but most of the time people only use a tiny subset of it. In order to find the tiny subset they actually require for their work, they still need to wade through the massive amount of Catalyst documentation.

Having a cheat sheet page would help a lot of users to find what they're after more quickly.

It should include at least all the built-in attributes, including all the dispatching mechanisms, as well as the most important methods for the request context, the request object, and the response object.

Write simple open source Mojolicious examples

Duration: 4 days

We'd love to see more simple open source examples for Mojolicious, of traditional apps like wikis, blogs and database admin tools or a real time app like a chat server or a web interface to control your lego robot or cat litter.

Medium Difficulty

Record Ubic tutorial screencast

Duration: 3 days

Retell Ubic::Manual::Intro in video form and put it online. Requirements: you'll need a mike to record sound; previous experience screencast recording software will obviously help.

Make sure the Moose training material is up to date

Duration: 4 days

The Moose training class material in http://git.shadowcat.co.uk/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=gitmo/moose-presentations.git;a=summary has been written some time ago. Your task is to make sure that the code examples in there still work without raising any deprecation warnings, and that the document generally represents the latest way of doing things with Moose.

Plack::Middleware::Auth::Form example code for one of the main Perl web frameworks

Duration: 3 days

Suggested mentor: Tadeusz Sośnierz (tadzikes@gmail.com) Suggested mentor: Tadeusz Sośnierz

Plack::Middleware::Auth::Form is an authentication component for web applications that works on the level of Plack middleware and thus is framework independent. The idea is to have web app components that would be as universal as possible. We need example code showing how it can be used in the main Perl web frameworks like Dancer, Mojolicious, Catalyst and others.

High Difficulty

Write and record Moose screencasts

Duration: 4 days

Moose has a very rich ecosystem around it, and for many it's hard to keep track of what's out there. The goal of this task is to raise awareness for certain very useful but not terribly well known modules in the Moose extension namespace MooseX::.

For that, find one or more of these modules, for example by having a chat about it with the Moose community, think of a practical use case for it, and produce a screencast illustrating how the modules helps solving the task.

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Translation

Tasks related to localization.

Low Difficulty

Update translations for Padre

Duration: 3 days

Padre, the Perl IDE http://padre.perlide.org/ has its UI in several languages but most of the translations are not up-to-date. The table at http://perlide.org/translations/ shows the status of the various languages. The languages that we currently have are: Arabic, Czech, German, Spanish, Persian, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Chinese Traditional and Simplified. From these the German, French and Japanese are almost up to date so the others would be more important.

Update an OpenWebMail translation

Duration: 2 days

Mentor: openwebmail@acatysmoof.com

OpenWebMail translation is handled through PO files. PO files are very easy to work with by using the POEdit software. By following our simple instructions anyone can update an existing translation with very little technical know-how.

Create an OpenWebMail translation

Duration: 2 days

Mentor: openwebmail@acatysmoof.com

OpenWebMail translation is handled through PO files. PO files are very easy to work with by using the POEdit software. By following our simple instructions anyone can create a translation with very little technical know-how.

Medium Difficulty

Translate the Moose website into a new language

Duration: 3 days

Currently the only available translations are English and German. We'd love to have some more coverage.

The website repository is available at git.shadowcat.co.uk as moose-website.git.

Translate a Mojolicious Guide

Duration: 3 days

The mojolicious guides (http://mojolicio.us/perldoc were originally founded by the Perl Foundation and has already been translated to Russian (https://github.com/xoma/Russian-translate-of-Mojolicious-guides) and japanese (https://github.com/yuki-kimoto/mojolicious-guides-japanese/wiki). We would love to see more translations of these:

• Mojolicious::Guides::Growing
• Mojolicious::Guides::Routing
• Mojolicious::Guides::Rendering
• Mojolicious::Guides::Cookbook
• Mojolicious::Guides::Cheatsheet
• Mojolicious::Guides::FAQ
• Mojolicious::Guides::CodingGuidelines

Transcribe and/or translate Perl screencasts

Duration: 2 days

I have several screencasts on YouTube presenting Perl 5 and Perl 6 given in English. Some of them already have English subtitles, some of them even have subtitles in other languages. It would be nice to have English transcriptions for all the recordings and subtitles in major languages used on the Internet: (Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, German, Arabic, French, Russian, Korean, Italian)

YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/gabor529

Github repository of the project: https://github.com/szabgab/screencasts

High Difficulty

Write and include code examples for Perl on Android

Duration: 3 days

Suggested mentor: Gabor Szabo

Perl can be used on Android via the SL4A http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ but it lack good examples. The student should setup Perl on the Android emulator, write several examples and submit them for inclusion in the SL4A repository.

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User Interface

Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction.

Low Difficulty

Figure out a way for MetaCPAN to display an author's perlmonger groups on his author page

Duration: 2 days

Every CPAN author has a customisable page at https://metacpan.org/author/$author_id. All authors can change the information displayed on their page by logging into CPAN.

The previous task is supposed to allow authors to specify which Perlmonger groups they associate themself with. This task is about figuring out how to actually display that author-provided data on the publically accessible author profile pages.

Display the bug summary on the MetCPAN distribution overview page

Duration: 2 days

This is the continuation of a previous coding task on adding bug summary data to the MetaCPAN index and consists of coming up with a nice way of showing the new bug data in the index and implementing it.

Medium Difficulty

Write the web frontend for authors to provide ther Perlmonger group affiliations on MetaCPAN

Duration: 2 days

Every CPAN author has a customisable page at https://metacpan.org/author/$author_id. All authors can change the information displayed on their page by logging into CPAN. On that account editing page, there's currently no way to specify the list of perlmonger groups as well as their URLs.

The HTML and JavaScript code to do that needs to be written.

Create JavaScript Release Widget/Badge for MetaCPAN

Duration: 2 days

Design a widget/badge which uses JavaScript to query the MetaCPAN API for the latest information on a release, eg: http://api.beta.metacpan.org/v0/release/App-cpanminus

The badge should include: author, date, distribution name, version, a link to the direct download URL as well as a link to the MetaCPAN release page.

This badge could then be used on web sites for Perl projects which exist on CPAN. It will always be in sync with the latest upload for a project, so it's useful for keeping up with version numbers as well as providing links to the official documentation which exists on MetaCPAN.

New Icon Sets for OpenWebMail

Duration: 4 days

Mentor: openwebmail@acatysmoof.com

We're always interested in new icon sets. You can start with the example iconset and change the icons in a paint program like Adobe Photoshop to make your own set. Adaptations of existing open source iconsets are also welcome. Images in the iconsets can be jpg, gif, or png files. You can visit our test installation to see how and where the icons are used in the interface.

Design for enlightenedperl.org

Duration: 2 days

A number of Perl sites have received facelifts in recent months and this greatly contributes towards the promotion of Perl and keeping the community looking fresh.

The Enlightened Perl Organisation need a design that encomapses the varied tasks they perform and implements modern web technologies to provide Facebook, Twitter and community site integration so that they can further promote this community organisation.

Design for Jobs.perl.org

Duration: 2 days

A number of Perl sites have received facelifts in recent months and this greatly contributes towards the promotion of Perl and keeping the community looking fresh.

Jobs.Perl.org needs a new look which will mean canvassing ideas of how to organise and display the current material and present it a contemporary design.

High Difficulty

HTML update for OpenWebMail

Duration: 5 days

Mentor: openwebmail@acatysmoof.com

Our system now supports complete separation of logic and presentation, so our layouts need updating. Our HTML is still using table based layouts. A student familiar with HTML can take our table based classic layout set with HTML::Template markup and create a new div based layout. Try one or several different areas of our interface, such as the calendar or the webdisk.

The student working on this project will be provided with an area where they can upload their layout for testing.