OSDC Perl 2026.01 report

Back in December 2025 I reached a decision that in 2026 I'd like to put a lot more emphasis on contributing to open source projects and helping others to start contributing.

I already had the OSDC web site I used for teaching a course on open source contributions So I started to use it and created pages for Perl, Python, and Rust. The 3 major languages I am going to work with.

In this report I'll focus on what I managed to do regarding Perl.

We had two online sessions in January (and the one at the end of December). During those events (and sometimes in-between the sessions), we managed to send quite a few pull-requests. Some of these were already accepted and integrated. (see bellow).

The major things we did were:

  • Added META-data to allow MetaCPAN to link to the repository of certain modules.
  • Added GitHub Actions to run the tests on every push.
  • Added Dependabot to keep the GitHub Actions up to date.
  • Added some tests to increase test coverage and to make changes in the code safer.

I also worked quite a lot on building Docker image for my experiments and to extend the perl-tester Docker image to include more modules.

The OSDC Perl page now also includes an extensive TODO list. Ideas on what to work on next.

In one session we used pair programming - the volunteers made the changes and I was navigating them through the process. I think it worked better than when I was doing and the others were watching.

Plans

In order to increase the success-rate of our PRs it might be a good idea to go visit the projects ahead of time and open issues asking the author if s/he is even interested in such PRs (eg. adding CI) and tell them about our events. Collect those issues on our site and work on those projects where the author responded positively.

Details