The Perl Toolchain Summit 2025 Needs You

Apr 4, 2025 by Philippe Bruhat (BooK)

Photo © Salve J. Nilsen, 2023, CC-BY-NC-4.0

This year in particular, the organizers have had difficulty reaching our fundraising targets for the Perl Toolchain Summit.

In the words of Ricardo Signes:

The Perl Toolchain Summit is one of the most important events in the year for Perl. A lot of key projects have folks get together to get things done.

Everyone who is invited to the Summit is a project leader or important contributor that is going to give their time and expertise for four days, to move the Perl toolchain forward. They give their time (sometimes having to take days off work, which is already a loss of income or holidays for them).

This is why, since 2011, we’ve done our best to at least partially refund their travel and accommodation expenses when needed. Everyone who’s attending the PTS should really only have to give four days of their life for it.

If the PTS can’t support its participants, then more and more of them are going have to either decline our invitation, or spend their own money, in addition to their time, to continue supporting the Perl Toolchain.

This is bad for Perl and CPAN.

Perl differs from other programming languages which have large corporations funding their development: it’s entirely supported by the community and its sponsors. In other words, by you.

How much does a PTS cost, by the way?

Let’s do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, assuming:

• hotel: 100€/night (most people are staying 5 nights, arriving the day before and leaving the day after),
• travel to Leipzig from Europe: 500€ round-trip,
• travel to Leipzig from outside Europe: 1,500€ round-trip,
• venue cost: 2,000€
• lunch, snacks and coffee breaks: 15€/day/person

We’re expecting about 35 people coming (out of 44 invitations sent), 22 from Europe, and 13 from outside Europe.

That brings us to a total estimate of 53,100 €, almost all costs considered. That’s a lot of money.

The organizers never actually spend that amount, because many of our attendees pay for themselves, or have their expenses covered by their employer (which we list as in-kind sponsors, alongside our financial sponsors).

Our budget for 2025 is of 25,000 €: that is our financial sponsoring target, as well as the amount we expect to pay directly to various suppliers. The rest is covered by in-kind sponsors or the attendees themselves.

What did the PTS produce?

Here are a few examples of some of the many results of past Perl Toolchain Summits:

• During the first edition, in 2008 in Oslo, a number of QA and toolchain authors, maintainers and experts came together to agree on some common standards and practices. This became known as “The Oslo Consensus”.
• In 2013 in Lancaster, a similar brain trust came together to address new issues requiring consensus (e.g. minimum Perl version supported by he toolchain) This became known as “The Lancaster concensus”.
• In 2015 in Berlin, another group assembled to address new issues, with a particular focus on toolchain governance and recommended standards of care for CPAN authors. This led to the “river analogy”, now widely used all around CPAN.
• In 2023 in Lyon, the minimum Perl version supported by the toolchain was amended to a rolling window of ten years.
• Also in 2023, the CPAN Security Group was created. It assembled again in 2024 in Lisbon, and met with the Perl Steering Council. It recently published its retrospective for 2024.
• The PAUSE Operating Model (a document which defines the permissions model for PAUSE and the community rules for how we manage them) came out of a discussion at the 2017 event, and built on discussions at earlier events.
• Numerous improvements to multiple toolchain modules (Test2, Devel::Cover, PPI), CPAN clients (CPAN, cpanminus, cpm) and services (MetaCPAN, PAUSE, CPAN Testers) have been discussed and implemented at PTS events.

What will this PTS achieve?

In this section, we’ll present two important projects some of the participants intend to work on this year.

CPAN Testers

The CPAN Testers is a system that collects all test reports sent by individual testers for all modules published on CPAN, on a wide collection of systems. This infrastructure has collected millions of test reports over the years, and provides an invaluable service to the community.

It makes those reports available to the module authors so that they can figure out failures on systems they don’t have access to, and other services depend on it to provide test-related data. Perl core development also depends on it, via a system we call Blead Breaks CPAN where development versions of Perl are used to test CPAN distributions, to ensure backwards compatibility.

Every company that depends on even a single CPAN module benefits from CPAN Testers.

The service has been running in a “degraded state” (as indicated on its home page) for several months now. One of the issues is that it has had a single person maintaining it for several years.

That person, as well as several volunteers willing to help them, will be attending the summit. The goal is not to just work together for 4 days to bring things back up, but to come up with a long term solution, and increase the size of the maintainer pool.

These volunteers are in the US, Brazil and France, to name a few.

Secure PAUSE uploads

PAUSE is the Perl Authors Upload SErvice. This is where CPAN authors uploads the tarballs for the distributions that end up on CPAN. That service took its first upload on August 26, 1995.

Accounts and uploads are only protected by passwords. As some people move away from Perl and CPAN, they stop using their accounts, making them targets for attackers. This is a very real supply chain attack vector. The PAUSE admins are very vigilant, but quickly reacting to issues is not a sustainable solution.

One of the topic that keeps coming up is protecting the accounts using SSH keys or Two Factor Authentication. This is not a trivial task, which involves dealing with very legacy code. Other avenues of improvement involve the expiration of accounts or permissions.

Over the years, in addition to fixing bugs and adding features, the maintainers attending the PTS have been able to port the server to a new web stack, made it possible to build the entire service on Docker for isolated testing, etc. The topic of 2FA came up in the past, but so far hasn’t been fully tackled yet. This will be on the agenda this year.

The PAUSE maintainers come from Austria, the US, and Japan.

Our sponsors

Here’s our current list of confirmed sponsors for the Perl Toolchain Summit 2025. (We’re currently in discussion with other sponsors, but nothing has been confirmed yet.)

Financial Sponsors

These sponsors simply wire some money to Les Mongueurs de Perl, the French non-profit that handles the organization of the event (they get an invoice in return), and expect the organizers to spend it on PTS expenses (see above).

Any money left over is used to kickstart the budget for the event the following year, as is our tradition since 2011.

Diamond Sponsors

• Booking.com

Gold Sponsors

• WebPros

Silver sponsors

• CosmoShop
• Datensegler
• SUSE
• OpenCage

Bronze sponsors

• Simplelists Ltd
• Ctrl O Ltd
• one individual who wishes to remain anonymous
• Findus Internet-OPAC

In-Kind Sponsors

We are very grateful for the companies whose employees are invited and that decide to cover their travel and accommodation expenses, and let them spend work hours on the event. This means a lot! This is why we’re promoting them as “in-kind” sponsors.

These sponsors pay for some of the PTS expenses directly (usually they own employees’ expenses). Just like our financial sponsors, the PTS wouldn’t be possible without them.

Corporate

• Grant Street Group
• Fastmail
• shift2
• Oleeo
• Ferenc Erki

Community

• The Perl and Raku Foundation
• Japan Perl Association

You too can help the Perl Toolchain Summit and Perl

First, you can read five reasons to sponsor the Perl Toolchain Summit.

Now that you’re conviced, here’s how you can help:

• as a company, you can get in touch with us and pick one of our sponsoring levels on our Sponsor Prospectus;
• as an individual, you can get on our donation page hit the PayPal button, and chip in directly.

On behalf of everyone who depends on Perl and CPAN, thank you in advance for your support!