I maintain 38 Perl modules across 5 distributions on CPAN, which by the standards of some authors puts me firmly in the small fry category.

Nevertheless, the logistics behind each release does tend to drag after the 78th time. (Not that I'm counting.)

For example, bumping version numbers on each of the, 22 and rising, plugin modules for Template::Benchmark is just the sort of mindlessly repetitive thing that screams out to be automated, but I end up doing it manually each release.

Now this sounds exactly like a job for Dist::Zilla, so why haven't I switched?

Thanks to a bug report by Adam Kennedy for Template::Benchmark, I found myself needing to do some testing on Windows this week.

Now to be clear, I've always loathed using Perl on Windows. I appreciate that some people use it, and I'm of the opinion that I should write my modules to work on it, but I'm happy to never touch it myself.

So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I downloaded Strawberry Perl for Windows.

Here are my first impressions.

I've just uploaded Template::Benchmark v1.03_02, the first release candidate for v1.04.

This adds two of the features that have been on my long-term goals for this project: custom datasets, and per-feature repeats.

The first lets you supply your own data-structure to use within the benchmark templates (or choose from a presupplied list).

The second lets you choose on a feature-by-feature basis, how often that feature should be used in the generated benchmark template, rather than only choosing how often the entire template would be repeated.

Taken together, these two features allow you far greater control of the generated benchmark, allowing you to tailor it to fit your individual needs with greater precision, read on for more details.

Having gone quiet for a month, I've managed to avoid distraction enough to release a project which had been stubbornly stalled for the past couple of months: a Perl Template Roundup.

Based on Template::Benchmark it's an exhaustive (and exhausting) bunch of benchmarks for a collection of Perl template engines, sliced this way and that way by feature, caching, phase of the moon, and anything else I could measure.