Con la versione 5.12 di perl sembra che le cose procedano in maniera più spedita non solo per il linguaggio in se, ma anche per la realizzazione degli ebuild per Gentoo Linux.
La release candidate 5 di perl 5.12 è già disponibile nel relativo overlay, grazie a qualche volontario che non finiremo mai di ringraziare. ;-)
Se avete una macchina non di produzione che vi avanza, è ora di provare l'upgrade!
Gentoo has been in a curious situation regarding Perl lately: for instance, the 5.10.1 version appeared in the Portage tree only a couple fo weeks ago (which would have been fine if there had been a 5.10.0 in the tree, but it was still stuck to 5.8.x). For the adventurous 5.10.0 was, however, available in the Perl overlay.
Why did it take so long for inclusion in Portage?
First of all, there's the usual problem of flie conflicts due to "dual-lifed" modules (those which live both in their own distribution/ebuild and in the Perl distribution): if they only have library files that's fine (the ones coming with the perl distribution go in /usr/lib/perl/, the ones installed via ebuilds go in /usr/lib/perl/vendor_perl which has @INC precedence). However, some modules (such as Encode) install files in /usr/bin as well and, since they're core, there's a file clash. Add to this that different perl version have different core modules and you're in a mess. This issue is still not fully solved and is one of the reasons the perl-5.10.1 ebuld in portage is both unmasked and without keywords (which is a way to say to users: be very aware).
A second problem is that a version shift of Perl tends to break a lot of packages (fex. inkscape had problems), which should be checked. This leads directly to the third problem: the Gentoo Perl herd is quite understaffed, and is seeking help. Luckily, we have tove++ who copes with the important things. Finally, perl 5.10.0 has many problems of its own which made things worse - it was actually not a good idea to include in (unpatched) in any distribution.
Said this, 5.10.0 does work quite well on Gentoo once you finish going through the upgrade process, which in some cases involves complete removal of perl 5.8.x and then installation of 5.10.1. One of the good things is that perl-cleaner, now at version 2.0, is much improved and works well in rebuilding modules and depending packages.
Regarding the modules, there's some progress. g-cpan is no longer a recommended way to automatically build Perl module ebuilds, and most of the work is now done by hand: more than 900 ebuilds (including modern things such as Moose and DBIx::Class) are directly available in the main Portage tree and regularly updated. Another 430 (including Catalyst and many modules related to it) can be found in the Perl Overlay: we try to keep these regularly updated as well.
There are also some attempts to new tools for automatic ebuild generation of Perl modules and dependencies, such as CPANPLUS::Dist::Gentoo. These efforts could help Gentoo become the best operating system for Perl which, because of the ebuild structure, might seem like an obvious achievement.
The Perl Overlay also has a parrot-scm branch, where, if you feel you want to code Perl 6, you can find rakudo.
So, as you can see there's a lot going on in the Gentoo world regarding Perl. There's however, a need for people who use Gentoo and have some spare time to help with all of this. If you love this distribution and there's something you want to do, show up in #gentoo-perl on Freenode.
