Re: Re-vitalizing cperl-mode

[Harald Jörg]

Hello Stefan,

>> Emacs comes with cperl-mode, a major mode to edit Perl programs.
> 
> As well as `perl-mode`, indeed.

I know, but as far as I recall I've never used perl-mode.

>> However, Perl is evolving... and I noticed that cperl-mode isn't
>> developed accordingly.
> 
> Indeed, neither `perl-mode` nor `cperl-mode` are getting much love
> these days.

Oh, they do get love.  From their users.  Their code doesn't, though :)

>> Should I just keep the status quo - and the Emacs dev team will decide
>> whether, and which of my changes you will adopt into the next Emacs
>> release?
> 
> Much better would be for you to step up as maintainer of the package:
> it's likely that in many cases the "Emacs dev team" wouldn't really have
> the resources or expertise to judge such changes.

That might be an option, yes.

> We can give guidance and feedback on the quality of the Elisp code, of
> course.

This is highly appreciated!

>> Would it be an option to give cperl-mode a "dual life" in Emacs and in
>> (M)ELPA?
> 
> Yes, we could easily distribute emacs.git's ` cperl-mode.el` as a GNU
> ELPA package as well (like we already do for python.el and a bunch of
> others).
> 
>> In any case: What rules / conventions / tools and frameworks should I
>> obey to make my changes palatable for Emacs and/or (M)ELPA?
> 
> Since `cperl-mode.el` is distributed with Emacs, its better to try and
> obey the conventions used for Emacs's own Elisp code.
> 
> Adding test cases under emacs.git/test would be a great contribution
> as well (there's currently a very limited set of testcases in
> test/manual/indent/perl.perl).

Indeed, limited... It also seems to exercise some interesting border
cases of fontification.  But manual tests are not very pleasant.

> The main rule there is that code's copyright needs to be assigned to
> the FSF.  I'll contact you off-list for that.

Thanks!

> PS: BTW, I assume you're familiar with https://github.com/jrockway/cperl-mode?

Yes, I am aware.  It seems that Emacs incorporated changes from this
repo, but the cleanups done in the Emacs version weren't merged back.

In short: Jonathan Rockway added stuff for Perl 5.10 and two modules
which bring their own keywords.  I want to go up to 5.32 and beyond,
and have a mechanism to support _any_ module which adds their own
keywords.

-- 
Cheers,
haj