First CPAN upload of 2010

Hi everyone - happy new year!

2009 came and went, so here's to an amazing 2010 for the Perl world, with even more than we already accomplished last year :-)

And look at that, it's only day 4 of 2010 and we already saw over 200 CPAN uploads. But don't look just yet! See if you can figure out what was the very first package upload to CPAN in 2010 (CPAN-time, of course). No clue? Couldn't care less? Well, call me curious, but I had to look ;-)

January 1st had several heavy competitors: PDL, Chart::Clicker, POE... even Plack was this close from being the one. But our "winner" is a rather young package by Marty O'Brien. I'm talking about Forks::Super, in it's 12th release.

Forks::Super provides new definitions for the Perl functions fork, wait, and waitpid with richer functionality. The new features are designed to make it more convenient to spawn background processes and more convenient to manage them and to get the most out of your system's resources. Take good old fork(), for example. Without arguments, it behaves just like it used to, but now you can also do stuff like:

     my $pid = fork { cmd => [ qw(/bin/prog opt1 $opt2 opt3) ] };

or

     my $pid = fork { sub => \&subroutine, args => [ @args ] };

Your can even set timeouts on your forks, queue jobs and obtain filehandles. Pretty cool, huh?

I haven't actually used it, but Marty took his time with a very comprehensive Pod, and even some information for windows users. So, if you usually use fork in your programs, be sure to check it out.

Until next time!