Hi all,

	I joined the perl herd awhile ago and have been helping out the cause.  I 
think it's fair I introduce myself as another point of contact in the madness 
that is perl in Gentoo.  So:

1) Who are you?

I'm Chris White, live in Northern California.  Hobbies include Japanese * and 
general excercise methods.

2) Are you considered sane?

Depends on what I'm doing, but in general no.

3) Why care about perl?

I started working on perl because I noticed quite a few jobs wanted perl 
experience as a requirement.  I decided to re-learn perl (I'd used it before 
slightly) and realized afterwards how powerful the language was for my 
general usage.  I realized that perl in Gentoo was a bit lacking, so I 
stepped in and started to help.

4) What can we expect in the future?

Ok, this leads to the second part of my email.  Consider this draft but it 
somewhat outlines my thoughts on the current situation:

1) g-cpan.pl needs help

I've noticed that quite a few bugs in bugzilla stem from g-cpan.pl issues.

2) Modules need updating

I'm sure mcummings has already shown this but:  
http://dev.gentoo.org/~mcummings/perl_updates.html.  While the script that 
created this has some minor issues, it still holds that it represents the 
fact that there are lots of packages that need bumping.

3) Collision protection needs work

mcummings and myself have been talking about this for a bit.  The plan seems 
somewhat set, but we just need to figure out what's going on.

4) Perl minimal needs to be looked at

Apparently perl with the minimal USE flag has caused some questions by various 
users as to what it entails.  If you have an idea on what USE="minimal" 
emerge perl should do, feel free to comment here.

5) More documentation

Documents should probably be setup for g-cpan usage, mod_perl setup, and what 
mcummings has already posted.

That's all I can think of for now.  Thanks for hearing me out even if it was 
boring, and I hope all works out towards a better Gentoo-perl integration.

Chris White
Gentoo perl developer

P.S., on the note of above, if what you've heard of is something you'd be 
interested in doing on a regular basis, feel free to contact me with regards 
to becomming a developer.