Dreamwidth Development

perltidy now required!

2019-05-25T20:42:48Z

Posted by: mark

Hi all,

I've gone ahead and run perltidy on our codebase and added a test that will run and tell you if things are tidy or not. This is now required for all PRs and code we're merging.

To set up and run it locally, first make sure your modules are up to date:

bin/checkconfig.pl

This will probably ask you to install some modules, do so! Then you can run tidyall and it will automatically reformat all of your files as necessary:

perl -I$LJHOME/extlib/lib/perl5 $LJHOME/extlib/bin/tidyall -a

The first time you run this will take a while. It caches the results though so further runs will be much, much faster.

That should be it -- let me know if this works for you or if you have any issues!

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Dreamhacks: Updated Locale::Country, and installed Log::Log4perl

2017-02-11T19:52:30Z

Posted by: sophie

Hello! Your friendly neighbourhood Dreamhack admin here.

I've updated the version of Locale::Country that the Dreamhack machine uses - we were on 3.25, and we're now on 3.42.

I also installed the Log::Log4perl module, as it's now being used by the codebase. This should make update-db.pl work again!

If there are any issues (related to these or otherwise), please comment and let me know!

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Dreamhack machine updated to use Template Toolkit 2.26

2014-11-27T16:07:01Z

Posted by: sophie

I have just installed Template Toolkit 2.26 on the Dreamhack machine. We were previously using 2.20, which is still installed but in such a way that the later version should take precedence.

As this is a core module for Dreamwidth, it's recommended that you restart Apache when possible. Things won't break just yet if you don't (since the old files aren't gone just yet), but according to my sources, the Dreamwidth codebase will require this new version of Template Toolkit soon, so things may break in the future.

As always, if anything breaks on the Dreamhack machine because of this change, please comment to let me know, or open a GitHub issue.

[edit 2014-12-07: Fix a typo.]

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Memory leak heads up

2013-07-07T00:58:26Z

Posted by: alierak

Anyone remember when we deployed some servers with Perl 5.10.0 and saw all sorts of problems with memory usage due to a memory leak in map? I ended up drastically reducing the number of requests each Apache process would handle before it exits, mark and I set up various cron jobs that would unceremoniously kill off workers every so often, etc. As we upgraded and phased out older servers, I think it was no longer a problem (e.g., web08 had Perl 5.10.1).

Well, it's looking like there's another Perl memory leak on the newest group of servers. They're running 5.14.2, and things like synsuck and resolve-extacct (really?) are using several gigs of RAM after a few days. I've set up an array of lovely new worker-restarting cron jobs, and I think this is the relevant Perl bug: perl: memory leak in Encode::decode. It is likely that we'll be able to patch this in production.

I guess if you have a choice, just skip to 5.14.4.

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Important: Perl 5.10 now considered required for DW installs

2012-07-18T05:15:43Z

Posted by: mark

Hi all,

We're here at OSCON (O'Reilly's Open Source Conference in Portland) with a bunch of the volunteers who work on Dreamwidth. Related to this, we've finally decided to force an upgrade to our Perl base version required.

kareila says it well:

Hello all! A few facts have recently come to our attention:

1) Perl 5.10 has a significant number of new, desirable features over Perl 5.8.

2) Perl 5.10 was released 5 years ago, so it's reasonable to assume most people are using Perl 5.10 or newer in production.

3) We are, in fact, using Perl 5.10 in production.

Therefore, we are planning to start requiring Perl 5.10 as we fix bugs and add new features in the future. If you are running a Dreamwidth installation on a version of Perl older than 5.10, now would be an excellent time to consider upgrading.

We are also considering moving to 5.12 or 5.14 soon. We need to do some more investigation and also validate the system on those versions. But for now, consider 5.10 as required.

Thanks!

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Introductory Perl Book temporarily free online

2012-06-15T01:10:40Z

Posted by: foxfirefey

I've heard some people lately saying they'd like to learn Perl recently, and rb mentioned in IRC that this work-in-progress book is temporarily available for free online:

Beginning Perl (Wrox)

There might be a few errors still to be fixed, but overall it could be a good resource.

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