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cpanm 1.1.2 - now with clean work directory

cpanm 1.1.2 is now shipped to CPAN with a small but great improvement: now it automatically cleans up the stale "work directories", so you don't need to worry about the ~/.cpanm/work/* taking up a lot of disk space after a heavy use of cpanm for 1 year etc.

The reason I tried to avoid implementing the cleanup was that I really dislike the default behavior of CPAN.pm, which is:

• It does the cleanup before your installation begins. This feels rude to me, like when you make a phone call to a customer support, they take the call but go on hold, saying "Hey I need to pee. Can you hold on for a minute?"
• The expiration is based on file sizes, which might have been nice when the disks are expensive. But disks are cheap now, and doing based on file size requires a lot of stat() calls.

So cpanm's cleanup behavior is solely based on the timestamps. By default it cleans up all the work directories older than 7 days. And the nice thing about this is that the work directories have its creation timestamp as its filename, so there won't be any stat() calls required for each work directories, even if you have many.

And yes, cleanup happens after your installation has finished. You won't really notice that it's happening.

cpanm 1.1 hearts minicpan and darkpan

App-cpanminus 1.1000 by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa - CPAN - FriendFeed

cpanm 1.1 is shipped, and with `--mirror-only` option, you can use it with your local minicpan mirror, or your own company's CPAN index (aka DarkPAN).

The only reason for a few experienced perl programmers who loves cpanm but can't use cpanm offline or at work was the lack of the proper mirror index querying support.

cpanm always has required an internet connection to resolve module name and dependencies, and always relies on CPAN Meta DB and search.cpan.org to query package index.

It's been a fair requirement for 95% of the usage, but again, for an experienced hacker who spends their most of airplane's time hacking code on their laptops, the offline support to fallback to local minicpan would be really nice. (Even though many airlines nowadays provide in-flight Wi-Fi :))

So I opened a bug to support `--mirror-only` option to bypass these internet queries and parse mirror's own 02packages.txt.gz file for module resolution a while ago, and a couple of people have tried implementing it in their own branches. (Thank you!)

Today I merged one of those implementations, and improved a little bit to make it run even faster and more network efficient.  The way to use it is really simple, just run cpanm with options such as:

cpanm --mirror ~/minicpan --mirror-only Plack

and it will use your minicpan local mirror as the only place to resolve module names and download tarballs from. (TIP: you can alias this like `minicpanm` to save typing) 

The current code extracts the gzipped file and reads the whole in memory and does a quick regular expression, which is very fast and not /that/ RAM hoggy (02packages is like 6MB file when uncompressed), but i hope this could be improved to be even more RAM efficient and still fast enough in the upcoming 1.1.x releases.

This is a huge step in cpanm history and makes it even more useful. You can upgrade your cpanm to the latest version by running `cpanm --self-upgrade`.

Enjoy!

The Notorious SGK38: Japan Sells T-Shirts with Logo of the Anonymous User Sengoku38 Who Leaked Video Footage of the Japan-China Boat Collision on YouTube - Japan Real Time - WSJ

Sengoku38, the notorious online handle of the person who leaked video clips of the Japan-China trawler collision on YouTube, can now claim the kind of fame that accompanies such recognition. Online shop ClubT began selling T-shirts emblazoned with “SGK38”, a shorthand version of the anonymous video poster’s online identity, the day after reels of the collision were published on YouTube on November 4. Why SGK38? Because it’s not a million miles from the acronym for all-conquering chart-toppers AKB48 – and it looks pretty similar too.

via blogs.wsj.com

Wow this is so awesome and I want the t-shirt.

Re: What Versions of Core Perl Should Module Authors Support?

Module authors, especially authors of widely used modules, should start thinking about this soon. Perl 5.14 should be out in early 2011, making it the second major version on the new release schedule. Once 5.16 comes out in 2012, I think we'll officially be in a new era of Perl 5. I hope that Moose and other major Perl modules will have a clearly defined policy for Perl version support before 5.16 comes out.

via blog.urth.org

Interesing post from Dave Rolsky on which version of perl should the CPAN module authors support.

I've been doing "5.8.1 as maximum *and* minimum" for almost all of my CPAN modules for 7 years or so, and probably will continue doing it for another 3 years, until when perl 5.18 is supposed to be shipped.

If that becomes more painful, i.e. the new core features in perl 5.14 or later becomes too attempting to not use, I'd probably change my mind and categorize my modules for three levels, based on its popularity (i.e. audience of the module).

First, modules that are extremely popular, widely used or have many downtstream dependents should have a better compatiblity support than other modules. Candidates are cpanminus and Plack. Their current perl minimum dependency is 5.8.1, and I see no problems at this point, doing so for another 3 years or so.

Second, new modules I create could be less conservative. Because they are new and don't have existing users, I could worry less about the breakage by depending on new versions of perl. Their current code won't be screwed - they just get upset when installing modules to see their version of perl is not supported :p So, if I make a new module that heavily uses smartmatch, or relies on the improved Unicode regular expression semantics in perl 5.14, I'm happy to do so.

Lastly, upgrading existing modules will be something in-between. I won't stick 5.8 to those things forever, but will definitely think twice about ditching 5.8. Honestly, most of my modules are write-only per se, except the one that has been actively developed such as cpanm or Plack. So the only chance they drop 5.8 support to prefer later version of perl would be when we want to rewrite everything, or when the module in question has a bug because of core perl's known problems.

see you FTTH, for now

I've been using the FTTH (Fiber to the Home) internet speed since 2004 when I was in Tokyo.

I moved to San Francisco in 2006 and used Comcast for just a few weeks and found that my apartment building has a better option, webpass that provides a shared FTTH 100 Mbps up/down and have been a happy customer since then.

Next week I'm moving to a new place, which is actually just a few blocks from the current place, but the place is not the lucky one that has webpass installed. I contacted webpass sales, and while my new landlord agrees to install the service, webpass claims that I need an approval from Home Owners Association at the new place that the majority of the tenants/owners would use it as a primary service, which might be possible but would take time.

So for now I signed up for sonic.net fusion. It's an ADSL 2+ service with unlimited landline voice, priced 20Mbps for $50. Not terrible, but it's a huge step down from FTTH that I've been spoiled for 7 years. I really wish sonic.net moves on to the fiber development soon, or that HOA approves webpass or Verizon FiOS coming to SF.

Amazon.co.jp MP3 launches

Amazon MP3、日本版スタート　DRMフリーで音楽配信 - ITmedia News

Amazon finally launches MP3 store in Japan. Like the one in US, their catalog is entirely DRM free.

It lacks supports from most major labels except EMI, so people are skeptical for the success of the service, but I believe it's a good step to the right direction.

Japan is the only country where iTunes Music Store still implements its DRM system, FairPlay. I don't quite understand why those music publishers still "demand" DRM they sell on the internet. They sell the CDs and even rent(!) them, which can be ripped to your computer without any protection, in a few seconds.

It just doesn't make sense at all.

I pay for music. A lot. Because I like music, and I'd love to listen to my favorite music anywhere on any devices. With DRM, that's just impossible. If I pirate music, that's all possible.

That's just wrong.

宇多田ヒカル - Goodbye Happiness

via www.youtube.com

Absolutely loving this video. Awesome self references to Traveling and Automatic videoclip :)