It's a new year and New Year's Resolutions abound. The Raku Steering Council is not impervious to that, and has come up with one of their own: "Reduce the backlog of open Problem Solving Issues".
A Little History
But first a little bit of history. In 2017 when it became clear that Larry Wall would not be around much more to decide on matters related to what is now the Raku Programming Language, a problem solving repository was created.
Since then 456 issues have been opened. Some of them have had a massive influence, such as "Perl" in the name "Perl 6" is confusing and irritating", which was instrumental in changing the name to the Raku Programming Language.
Another one that created a lot of work, but preserved all of the issue history in the development of the Raku Programming Language, was "rt.perl.org is shutting down".
But over the past years, a backlog has formed itself in the problem solving repository, with currently 266 open issues, with the oldest being of 2017.
Reducing the backlog
It is one of the functions of the Raku Steering Council to provide tie-breaking on these issues if the community cannot come to a resolution. But it's just hard to find the time and the focus to make these types of decisions. Yet it's clearly really time to start reducing this backlog!
In the last meeting of the Raku Steering Council, the idea to hold an online meeting about a set of problem solving issues was formed. Such a meeting would allow members of the community to comment on the issues at hand, and the RSC would then (ideally) be able to get to a tie-breaking decision.
To start off with some of the (hopefully) simpler issues, it was decided to have the first meeting be about the problem solving issues marked "documentation". Which currently are (in reverse chronological order):
- Specify documentation URLs
- Generic name for FALLBACK and CALL-ME
- SEO for the keyword "rakulang" seems poor
- Separate Community Resource pages
- Function return types should also tell about the used assignment/container
- Raku Classification System
- Seq vs. List - Iterable, instead?
- What makes
unitbe too late?
When and where
The when has been decided for the first meeting: Saturday 17 January 2026 at 19:00 UTC (20:00 CET, 14:00 EST, 11:00 PST, 04:00 JST (18 Jan)), and to take one hour maximum. If not all of these issues have been resolved, they will be moved to a future meeting.
Selecting a time is always difficult in these situations. The reason this time was selected, was that it would be 1 hour before the next Raku Steering Council meeting, so at least the Raku Steering Council members would be more or less available already. And also because that time turned out to be the least problematic for them, and thus possibly also for other Raku Community members.
The where is, at least for now, on Jitsi: https://meet.jit.si/SpecificRosesEstablishAllegedly. The reason Jitsi was selected, is that it has proven to be working with minimal hassle for at least the Raku Steering Council meetings. As the only thing you need to be able to attend, is a modern browser, a camera, and a microphone. No further installation required.
Preparation
Any Raku Community member is welcome to this meeting. Do you consider yourself a Raku Community member? You're welcome. It's as simple as that.
But please make sure you have looked at the issues that will be discussed before attending the meeting. And if you already have any comments to make on these issues, make them with the issue beforehand.
The original contributors to these issues will also be notified (unless they muted themselves from these issues). We hope that they also will be able to attend.
Small steps
Whether this format of problem solving issue resolution will work, all depends on Raku Community members attending and contributing. The Raku Steering Council hopes very much that this format will work!
So if you consider yourself a Raku Community member, please try to attend! If anything, it will allow you to put faces to the names that you may be familiar with.
Hope to see you there!
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