A new release of the Perl distribution Crypt::OpenSSL::X509 have seen the light of day.

The release does as such not offer anything new, but it contains some very important changes from a maintenance perspective.

If you ready up on the list of releases, you can see that several releases have been followed by additional release shortly after due to bad releases.

I can mention:

• 1.9.12 fixing 1.9.11 - upload repair
• 1.9.10 fixing 1.9.9 - repair to broken MANIFEST
• 1.9.7 - repair to broken META.yml
• 1.9.5 - totally breaking Linux builds in 1.9.4
• 1.9.1 fixing 1.9 - version number issue
• 1.8.11 re-release of 1.8.10 with corrected meta-data

This is over a period of 3+ years, but it is not particularly impressive.

There are many reasons, if not to say excuses related to this and I might dig into these in a separate blog post, lets just say I am welcoming the improvements and I hope the will stabilize the release process, so we can focus on the actual distribution, since we have much work to do.

The importanten changes are a migration of the distribution toolchain from Module::Install to Dist::Zilla. I am not the original author of Crypt::OpenSSL::X509, so I was always reluctant to a change to Dist::Zilla even though it is recommended since Module::Install is deprecated and it does improve the overall tooling.

I did however mention my challenges in my blog post for releae 1.9.11/1.9.12. And one of the regular contributors Shoichi Kaji provided a PR prosing the migration to Dist::Zilla, he even adopted Dist::Zilla configurations parts from some of my other relases, so I would feel more at home - such magnificent service, thanks @skaji.

Another regular contributor Timothy Legge was quick to jump in and review the PR. Additionally he provided some improvements to the macOS CI jobs and we were good to go - thanks @timlegge.

Since the migration was quite significant I improved the release process by adopting the oppotunity of making a trial release. A trial release, or development release, is not indexed on CPAN and therefor you do not break down stream distributions relying on your distribution, but it does get picked up by CPAN-testers. The release most certainly did and it actually looked good, so 6 days after the trial release was made I made the official release and it is now available on CPAN.

Next steps are improving the build on the *BDSs and support for OpenSSL 3 and I hope the road there will be less painfull for me and others, with more stable releases.

Change log

1.9.13 Sat Feb 26 00:36:28 CET 2022

• The distribution has changed distribution toolchain from Module::Install to Dist::Zilla, thanks to @skaji for PR #96 and thanks to @timlegge for the review of the proposed changes

• The macOS CI jobs have been improved with PRs #98 and #99 from @timlegge

1.9.13-TRIAL Sun Feb 20 21:31:44 CET 2022

• Release leading up to 1.9.13, see that release for details

• This is a TRIAL release, in order to get some feedback from CPAN-testers prior to making a proper public release, since the changes to the build system has been quite significant. Additional trial releases might follow, based on findings and feedback