Our tenth season starts in just over two weeks:

Perl Seminar New York
Tuesday Oct 20 2009
6:15 - 8:15 pm
NYPC User Group
481 8th Ave (Ramada New Yorker Hotel, West 34 St)
Suite 550

Main Topic: "Take the Future of Perl into Your Hands!"

BRING YOUR LAPTOPS FOR THIS ONE! This will be a workshop session
much like the "Parrot Build-Fest" we had in spring 2008. Bring your
laptops (suitably prepared -- see below) so you can directly follow
the discussion leaders.

At Yet Another Perl Conference in Pittsburgh in June, once and future
Perl 5 pumpking Chip Salzenberg announced the Perl 5 Corehackers
Project. Chip wants many more people to be looking at, and hacking
on, the Perl 5 core source code and the modules that are part of the
Perl 5 distribution. The more people who do that, the more people
who understand how Perl works and who can suggest improvements in Perl.

Perl 5 core hacking has become much easier in the past year since the
source code was moved to a distributed source control repository run
on Git. That means that anyone, anywhere, can easily get his/her
own copy of the source code and hack on it to learn how it works and
to come up with improvements. In particular, online repository sites
like Github and Gitorious make sharing among developers much easier.

Whether or not you prefer distributed source control management
systems like Git or Mercurial to centralized systems like CVS and
Subversion is a personal choice; we're not going to get into that
discussion at this meeting. But since the Perl 5 source code is now
stored in Git, all serious Perl hackers should get familiar with the
mechanics of accessing that code, making and storing simple
revisions, and providing access to those revisions online to other
developers.

So at this meeting we're going to train you with just enough
knowledge of Git and Github to get you going. We'll set up the
tables so you have a place for your laptops. Jim Keenan will provide
a brief background on the Corehackers project. Then Steve Lembark
and others will coach you through:

* Getting Git installed on your laptop (if you don't have it
installed already). Bonus points for coming to the meeting with Git
already installed or your laptop or remote server!
* Setting up a github.com account.
* Copying the Perl 5 source code into your github.com account.
* Getting that source code onto your laptop or remote server.
* Doing a checkout into a sandbox, making simple revisions and
committing them.
* Getting those revisions back up to your github.com account.

But wait, there's more!

* We'll show you how to share your distributed repositories via USB
keychain when you don't have wireless Internet access!

To get the most out of this session, bring your laptop, preferably
with Git already installed (http://git-scm.com/download).

See you on Tuesday, October 20, 6:15 pm.

Jim Keenan