Friday I handled a PR from the friendly helper Dependabot. One of the dependencies to one of my Go repositories had been updated. This resulted in version 0.6.0 of punycode, a little CLI tool I implemented in Go just for the sake of learning how to write command line tools in Go.

Next up was an update to the base image of the Docker image for the GitHub Action for spell checking, which I maintain. After some building and testing, I was able to ship release 0.33.0.

Since I am also serving a canonical version, based on the Git tag, currently v0 I noticed that for the tests it had used version 0.30.0 and not 0.33.0 as expected. This was due to a mistake on my site, I have simply forgotten to move the v0 tag in Git. So I ended up updating my release check list, I will hopefully not forget this the next time.

On the repository for Crypt-OpenSSL-x509 I had received a bug report. The submitter is an old friend from the Perl community I have had the pleasure of meeting on several occasions, many years ago though. Anyway, the bug report was pretty detailed, so I got the first shot if a basic fix sent to review. Today I got some feedback and made I minor tweak I had overlooked in the original description. I had a few minor issues and disable the automated build on macOS 10.15, which has been deprecated - finally everything worked out and release 1.9.15 was shipped to CPAN.

Monday I was bombarded with PRs of the above update of the spellchecker GitHub Action to all of my repositories, so these where just approved and Dependabot took care of it - I do not make releases when I update the infrastructure or toolchain of a project. However among the many PRs from Dependabot another PR for punycode was hiding, so version 0.7.0 was released today, with yet another dependency update.

This was a little tour of both small and large repositories, some popular, some just for myself. Visiting these do demonstrate that is should be done somewhat regularly to catch issues of deprecation and keeping the release processes on point.

I am pondering if I could automate the release of the spellcheck action, since it's many manual steps have proven been a challenge in the past and again this weekend.

The Perl distribution release is really easy since it uses Dist::Zilla. And the Go repositories are even more easy since I just have to create a tag and it just works from there, a little more unpredictable compared to the Perl distribution platform, since the Go equivalent is still pointing to version 0.5.0 at the time of writing. Ref: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/jonasbn/punycode

I have outstanding work on much of the stuff I mentioned here and I hope to be able to get that addresses also, when time permits.

• punycode needs to be extended with support for some more special letters
• Crypt-OpenSSL::x509 needs to be able to support OpenSSL 3
• And the GitHub Action for spellchecking has a large user base, I want to help out, so their projects are running smoothly