VANCOUVER, British Columbia – June 24, 2002 – Looking for a scintillating grassroots Perl experience? ActiveState is delighted to again be a sponsor for the fourth annual YAPC. Attend some BoFs to learn more about our popular Perl-based technologies from ActiveState's Neil Watkiss.
When: Wednesday June 26th @ 7-9 pm
Where: Washington University, McDonnell Room 162
CPAN Run – An automated system of building and testing CPAN packages
ActiveState's Perl Package Manager (PPM) has been around since the earliest versions of ActivePerl. PPM allows people to quickly install CPAN modules, even if they don't have a compiler or the ubiquitous "make". Unfortunately, ActiveState's PPM repository can get out of date with the CPAN, since many packages can only be built with some degree of human involvement. ActiveState has developed a CPAN-to-PPM build system which automatically imports CPAN packages, applies patches to fix common problems, builds, tests, and publishes the packages in PPM format. I'll go over the problems we found and how we solved them, and how we hope to add cool new features, like letting CPAN authors view build logs and review patches applied by ActiveState.
PerlMx – The SPAM Stops Here
ActiveState's PerlMx acts as a flexible email gateway in front of your existing systems. PerlMx is a Sendmail milter plugin designed for detecting spam, viruses and standard policies such as mail auditing and adding banners to outgoing email. Because it runs at the gateway or server level, all email can be treated centrally, rather than requiring each user to filter his or her own mail using SpamAssassin with procmail or similar methods. PerlMx will facilitate a site-wide policy as the default and the server can be configured to allow per-user policies in addition to the defaults. I'll discuss the technical implications of using Perl as a milter, and how the PerlMx dev team overcame certain barriers. I'll also talk about the cool new features we are looking to add, and further barriers we expect need to be conquered.
