The past week has been a flurry of patches. moritz++ contributed the code to what will eventually become the new HTML::Template, with a corresponding test suite. Development is stuck in a branch for the time being, blocking on #58392 which causes many tests to fail. (Dear parrot folks: help appreciated. Incorrect call stack semantics is one of the few things that are hard to temporarily work around.)

moritz++ continued by contributing his own Text::Escape module, which will replace the simplistic solution used right now, as soon as we figure out why it crashes when loaded.

Later in the week, Илья Беликин (ihrd++) of Vladivostok.pm joined forces with us, sending several patches for the CGI module. Илья asked many sensible questions, and I reached the realization that there's too little readily available information out there for people who want to hack. The rest of this post will try to remedy that.

(But first, a short commercial break. If you find yourself in the vicinity of Vladivostok on 26 September, consider joining FEPW 2008 where I hear they might even do some November hacking.)

5 things you might be helped by if you plan to hack on November

1. First, feel free to ignore these rules if they inconvenience you. They are there to help you, not to restrict you.
2. The three files FEATURES, JANITORS and LOOKINTO together constitute our roadmap right now. Note that these files are found in p5w/, the Perl 5 implementation of the wiki. [Update 2008-09-21: Now they're found in docs/ instead.]
3. As a rule, we implement feature-size things in p5w before we try them out on p6w. This is because bugs easily distract from the goal in p6w. The Perl 5 version is a sort of live spec for the Perl 6 version.
4. We're currently doing quite a bit of our work in branches. Currently, there are two branches: new-html-template aims to replace the HTML::Template with a new grammar-using module, and tests is a playground for new test files for other modules. (Things like branches change quickly. github is the ultimate reference.)
5. Patches are very welcome, nowadays through the mailing list november-wiki@googlegroups.com, or the IRC channel #november over at irc.freenode.org.

Enjoy!