wxCPANPLUS

(Sorry for the tardiness of this report – i have been having problems connecting to the wordpress servers.)

Finale
This past week i have added a ton of comments and finished the online documentation. Since i bought a new laptop last week, I was very eager to get the OSs installed and running as quickly as possible. I created 3 100Gb partitions – one for Windows Vista, One for Linux, and a shared partition. It only took about 2 hours to get both OSs installed and updated!

Vista
Well, I _tried_ to test on Vista, but ran into problems installing CPANPLUS via Strawberry Perl. I guess I needed more time to figure out Strawberry’s inner sanctum. I plan on having it working on Strawberry by the end of next month, if not sooner. I have had too many problems with Vista, but continue trudging along, because i am using it only for a couple of games (Gothic 3 and Portal) and for cross-platform testing and development.

Fedora 9
I love Fedora, and have been using it since FC1 was in beta. (Before that, I used RedHat, since 5.0.) When testing wxCPAN on Fedora 9, I ran into quite a few bugs that seem to be related to the updated versions of Wx-Perl and CPANPLUS. The search method freezes right in the middle. This didn’t happen on Fedora 7, my last system, with CPANPLUS 0.78 and Wx 0.77. I hope to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

Future
I plan on moving the PODReader into its own module, probably Wx::PODReader. I have added quite a bit of documentation to wxCPAN, to aid future development, possibly by others. I plan on continuing development until CPAN becomes obsolete. I would also like to test wxCPAN on the parrot platform. I hear Strawberry Perl is looking for such a tool as wxCPAN, and would like to contribute to Strawberry, if time allows. Since I am a student, i won’t have much time, but I love to code, and do so frequently. This project has given me a long-standing goal, and I love long-standing goals.

Farewell
Well – it’s been a great trip! I have had a lot of fun. I could not have done it without the support of my mentor Herbert, Eric, my wife Sarah, and the entire Perl community. Thank you all!

This week, I have tried to install and familiarize myself with Strawberry perl, so I can test on that platform. I have worked out some errors and bugs, and added a bit of documentation – especially on the wxCPAN googlecode site. I have switched to the issue tracker on the web site for all bugs and feature requests. I have also released a couple of files to CPAN. Since I am on vacation until wednesday, I plan on immersing myself into wxCPAN from Thursday to Sunday, where I hope to do lots more testing and documentation.

I have had tons of fun on this project, and look forward to extending it in the next few weeks, before school begins. I hope to have a real production release, with all the features of any great GUI tool, before the end of the year, if not sooner.

I uploaded my first release to PAUSE yesterday! I tweaked around with it for a few hours, only to find out this morning that I didn’t need to do any tweaking. Oh, well – so it goes.

This week, I prepared my module for release to CPAN. I used Module::Install for the Makefile.PL. There is a script in the misc/ directory that I apparently didn’t need to use, but it’s there in case anyone else wants to use it. It cleans the directories, makes HTML docs out of perldocs, and creates a .gz file. This can all be accomplished with `make dist`. (There is so much information to wade through for CPAN authors, I seemed to have missed a few important items.)

I have also tried to optimize the search algorithm, but it seems to take a little longer than I want. I am going to work on it some more this coming week.

I have also tried to resolve the scrollbar issue in the modules list. The problem is that it is inside a wxSplitter, and the scrollbars only show up for really long lists. I am going to get rid of the splitter, and make the information pane a static size. This should resolve the issue until I figure out how to get it working in a Splitter.

So – this coming week, I have three items i wish to address: The scrollbars in the Modules List, the search algorithm, and creating a toolkit for CPAN authors.

Unitl next week – Happy coding!