# Perl6 Community Development Server

This server, known as "feather", is dedicated to the development of Perl6. It provides free resources to Perl6 contributors, including:

- A shell account
- A recent version of pugs to work with
- svk for source control. (Like svn, but faster)
- Web space (listing)
- IRC chat (Freenode #perl6)
- Mail

See the original announcement for details.

## Getting Started with Perl6

We maintain our own Perl6 documentation index here. It's cross-referenced with the test suite to make it super useful.

- Perl6 Documentation

Further useful information can be found through our sister sites;

- The Pug's Blog
- pugscode.org
- dev.perl.org/perl6

We also link back to several pages on the Pugs wiki. It's now preferred to update web pages through Subversion, and have them appear here.

- PugsArchitectureHistory - A Good place to start.
- PugsDownload
- PugsCommunity (irc, mailinglist, people)
- PugsInTheNews (especially the perl.com interview)
- Perl6Talks (especially YAPC June 2005)
- FrequentlyAskedQuestions (quite rough)
- Perl6Nomenclature (glossary)
- SmokedPugs ( HTML smoke test reports - pretty!)
- ConvertingPerl5ToPerl6
- PreludificationCandidates (some helpful things to write in Perl 6 - may be outdated)
- KwikiFormattingRules documentation at kwiki.org
- TodoTestsToBeRechecked - tests marked TODO/skip that will need to be checked when big subsystems are replaced
- PodTables (a proposal for adding tables to the .pod document format)
- Pugs-related news are available from PlanetSix: http://planetsix.perlfoundation.org/

## Getting started on Feather

Once you have an account, you can publish files in ~/public_html and they will be accessible at http://feather.perl6.nl/~foo/.

To find out what users are doing here and what they have to say, finger them. They can hide their ~/.plan from the outside world by creating a ~/.nofinger file.

## FAQ: Can I use CGI/mod_perl on feather?

Yes, but not via the default Apache. Every form of web development requires specific settings, and that makes maintenance hard. It is, however, very easy to run your own Apache. Here's how:

>     cp -rp ~juerd/apache ~
>     perl -i -pe's/juerd/$ENV{USER}/g' ~/apache/httpd.conf
>     perl -i -pe's/Listen 8000/"Listen " . (7000 + $<)/e' ~/apache/httpd.conf

To start your web server, run `/usr/sbin/apache -f ~/apache/httpd.conf`. To stop it, run `killall apache` (ignore that it couldn't kill the system wide apaches).

## FAQ: How do I redirect my feather email to my other mail address?

Use qmail's .qmail system. See `man dot-qmail` for details.

>     echo '&other-address@example.org' > ~/.qmail

## FAQ: How can I upload files to feather?

Via SFTP or SCP, that both work over SSH. Consult the manpages for detailed instructions. The simplest invocations are:

>     scp some.file username@feather.perl6.nl:      # puts it in your homedir
>     scp some.file username@feather.perl6.nl:path  # uploads to path

>     sftp username@feather.perl6.nl                # provides an FTP-like CLI

Windows users can use the `pscp` and `psftp` instead. These utilities can be found on the PuTTY Download Page.

Alternatively, for Windows there's also a nice graphical utility called WinSCP, and for Unixlike systems there are several integrated solutions, like the "sftp://" protocol in Konqueror and Nautilus.

## FAQ: Can I keep a script running on feather?

Surely you can, as long as you use the "sleep" command or something like that.

If you're trying to instruct feather to do certain things periodically, please consider using the cron program. There's a cron tutorial.

Use of the "crontab -e" command on feather is strongly recommended.

If you are looking for automatic refreshing of the pugs source tree, you can always read ~audreyt/pugs/, which is constantly being updated from svn via evalbot according to Audrey.

## FAQ: How can I override the default charset of feather's Apache?

Simply create a .htaccess file under your ~/public_html/ with the following line in it:

>     AddCharset UTF-8 .html

This example specifies UTF-8, but you should have it match your document. After that, Apache will use the encoding you've specified in .htaccess for all the .html files in the current directory and all its subdirectories.

Apache loads .htaccess on every request, so there should be no delay once you have set this.

This web site is in Pugs' repository, in docs/feather. If you have the time and skills to improve it, please do not hesitate. The site is synced every 5 minutes.