They make Mageia: Jérôme Quelin

Now that things are well on their way and that Mageia 1 is there, it’s time to discover some more about the persons that are making this a reality.

Today, this is about Jérôme; thanks to him for being the first!

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Who are you? Where do you live? What do you do for a living?

I am Jérôme Quelin (aka jq), 34 years old. I am married and a father of a little boy. We are living in Lyon, France, where I’m working at Renault Trucks.

How/where do you contribute to Mageia? what else do you contribute to, and why?

I am the maintainer of Mageia’s Perl stack. This consists of Perl itself, and of all the CPAN modules available within Mageia.

Note: Perl is a high-level programming language in which applications and systems can be written; a lot of Mageia relies on this.

I am also a Perl developer, owning a few modules on CPAN and contributing to some others.

So, what’s special about Perl in Mageia? what can one do with it? what’s available?

Perl has nothing fancy on Mageia, it’s usually the latest one which is available (note: Mageia 1 ships with Perl 5.12.3 since 5.14.0 was too late in our release cycle).

But Mageia shines on the number of CPAN modules available at the tip of your fingers: around 2,500 distributions, accounting for ~17,000 modules. That’s a little bit less than 20% of CPAN, but that’s quite huge! I don’t know what the other distributions are shipping, but I think it’s a lot less.

All the latest & greatest modules are in: Moose, POE, Dancer, Catalyst, Dist-Zilla, etc. – you name it.

All those modules are of course updated on a regular basis, integrated with the system libraries… and sometimes even fixed to make them compile (patches & bug reports of course sent upstream).

Mageia also has a great tool to maintain the cpan modules up to date: magpie. It shouldn’t be too hard to add support for other distributions, if you’re interested.

For instance, to install a given Perl module, just do:

$ sudo urpmi 'perl(Foo::Bar)'

and if the module is missing, you can open a bug report and we’ll work on packaging it for you.