# Perl Weekly #791 notes a MetaCPAN night mode, two Dancer2 releases marked as security updates, and a community-run Lacuna Expanse revival

The 791st issue of Gabor Szabo's Perl newsletter points readers to a dark theme on MetaCPAN, Dancer2 2.2.0 and 2.2.1 with security framing, a community reboot of The Lacuna Expanse described in a post by Natalie Rose, and an unresolved reader report that MetaCPAN fails to render POD for WebForms.pm.

Canonical URL: https://freelancenews.online/news/metacpan-adds-night-mode-as-the-lacuna-expanse-community-restarts
Published: 2026-09-20T23:07:17.188Z
Updated: 2026-09-25T10:16:14.421Z
Source published: 2026-09-20T22:44:02.000Z
Event date: Not established
Review status: source-reviewed
Review method: Automated comparison against retrieved source text; not independent fact-checking.

Editorial note: Updated after automated comparison with the full extracted source text. Attribution, wording and practical context were re-evaluated; this is not an independent fact check.

## Report

Perl Weekly issue 791, edited by Gabor Szabo, leads with three short pointer items: MetaCPAN has a night mode, The Underbar has a new episode, and The Lacuna Expanse is back. The newsletter presents each as a one-line signpost rather than an article, so the extracted text establishes that these changes exist without supplying the implementation detail a developer would normally want before acting on them.

The MetaCPAN item is a single sentence. The newsletter does not say when the theme shipped, how a reader turns it on, whether it follows an operating-system preference, or whether it covers the whole site or only parts of it. For developers who read module documentation in long sessions, a dark display option is a small but real quality-of-life change; the supplied evidence does not let us describe it beyond the newsletter's own claim.

The Lacuna Expanse item is attributed to a post by Natalie Rose titled "The Lacuna Expanse: Updates Since We Last Saw Each Other," which the newsletter characterises as "a new community-run reboot of The Lacuna Expanse" and links to TLE Community. The wording attributes the revival to the community rather than to the game's original operator. No launch date, hosting arrangement, feature list or statement about the original game's status appears in the extracted text, so the reboot should be treated as a newsletter claim rather than a verified relaunch.

The issue also carries two release notices credited to Jason A. Crome: Dancer2 2.2.1, marked "(security)," and Dancer2 2.2.0, accompanied by the phrase "security updates PLEASE READ." The newsletter frames both as releases a reader should look at, and the second notice explicitly urges reading. The extracted text does not include the underlying vulnerability, the affected version range, or remediation guidance, so the practical takeaway is limited to checking the linked notices and your own dependency versions.

Olaf Kolkman appears as the guest on Episode 10 of The Underbar. According to the newsletter, his extensive work in networking and open source brought him to Internet Technology, Policy and Advocacy at the Internet Society, and the conversation is dated September 2025. The newsletter states that this second part of the discussion addresses the Internet Society (ISOC) and the management of volunteer organisations. Beyond this episode description, the series' format is not established by the evidence.

One entry in the issue is a question rather than an announcement. A reader reports that visiting WebForms on MetaCPAN returns the message "Error rendering POD for WebForms.pm" because the requested resource is a binary file. The newsletter reproduces the error text without resolving it, so it is unclear from the evidence whether this is a known limitation, a packaging problem, or something being fixed. It is a useful counterpoint to the night-mode item: the same site can fail to render documentation for some distributions.

The issue also lists other community items: Olaf Alders on dark mode, Nigel Horne's NWC2MusicXML converter for NoteWorthy Composer 2 to MusicXML, Rob Lauer's "Reflecting on Mirrors" parts I and II plus an Amazon::S3 v2.1.0 release described as "On Being an S3 Client," Ron Savage's announcement of Perl.Wiki V 1.54, a post on reading JSON latency events in Perl, and a question about how to report bugs on cpan.org. These are newsletter pointers, not independently verified reports.

The Perl Weekly Challenge, run by Mohammad Sajid Anwar, appears in two forms. Challenge 392 sets the tasks "Convert Palindrome" and "Words Length Product." A recap covers Challenge 391's "Array Median" and "Arrange Box" tasks. The newsletter states that participants can win a $50 prize, with one champion picked each month from among contributors, sponsored by Marc Perry.

The recap summarises third-party write-ups in some detail. Bob Lied is credited with a demonstration using modern Perl and object-oriented practices including Perl 5.44 class syntax and object overloading. E. Choroba is credited with benchmarking list slices for median calculation and analysing a trim operation in path-state processing. Luboš Kolouch is credited with multi-language solutions in Perl and Python. These are the newsletter's characterisations, not independent reviews.

Further recap entries describe W. Luis Mochán's concise Perl one-liners extended into a production-style script, Matthias Muth's explanation of the mathematical and algorithmic aspects of both tasks, and Packy Anderson's multilingual summary in Perl, Raku, Python and Elixir that uses pre-sorted inputs when merging arrays. Peter Campbell Smith is credited with prioritising clarity over conciseness, using array concatenation and index arithmetic for the median.

The recap also covers Reinier Maliepaard's formatted treatment of the Array Median task, Robbie Hatley's report that reduces 2D box nesting to a Longest Increasing Subsequence problem solved with patience sorting and binary search for O(n log n), Roger Bell West's depth-first search approach with solutions in Raku, Rust and PostScript, and Simon Green's Python and Perl write-up.

One of those write-ups is available in the supplied evidence as a repository README. Matthias Muth's "Arrays of Numbers, Arrays of Boxes" documents both Challenge 391 tasks. For the median task, he merges the two sorted inputs by re-sorting the combined values rather than implementing a merge subroutine, then returns the mean of the two middle values for an even-length result or the middle value for an odd-length one.

For the box task, Muth describes modelling the boxes as a directed acyclic graph in which edges run from a smaller box to a larger one that can contain it, noting that the graph is not a tree because several starting boxes may be mutually incompatible and several smaller boxes can fit into the same larger one. His algorithm sorts boxes by width, initialises a path length of 1 for each, and updates the path length of any box that is larger in both dimensions when the combined stack would be longer.

Muth states the nested loop runs in O(n²) and that the implementation still solves 1000 boxes in under a second on his machine. He also documents the Perl idioms he relies on, including use v5.36 for strict, warnings, subroutine signatures and postfix dereference syntax, and an explicit numeric comparison block in sort because sort is lexicographic by default. These are the author's own claims about his code, not benchmark results we verified.

The newsletter's event listings include Amsterdam PM on 6 October 2026, Boston Perl Mongers' virtual monthly on 12 October 2026, a Model Context Protocol in Perl session with Dave Cross on 21 October 2026, "Punk: Perl MVC, compiled at boot" on 16 November 2026, the London Perl & Raku Workshop 2026 on 21 November 2026, YAPC::Tokyo 2026 on 27 November 2026, and the German Perl/Raku Workshop 2027 on 14–16 April 2027. A "This week in PSC (235)" item is dated 2026-09-14.

For freelancers and developers working in Perl, the most immediately actionable item is the pair of Dancer2 releases, because the newsletter itself flags them as security updates and tells readers to read the notice. Anyone running Dancer2 in production has a reason to open the linked release notes and check their dependency versions, even though the extracted evidence does not state which versions are affected or what the fix changes.

The MetaCPAN night mode is a smaller practical change for developers who spend long sessions reading module documentation, and the WebForms rendering error is a reminder that documentation display on MetaCPAN can fail for some distributions. Neither item comes with a changelog in the supplied material, so users should verify behaviour on the site rather than rely on the newsletter summary.

The Lacuna Expanse reboot is the least specified item. The newsletter attributes it to the community and links a post by Natalie Rose, but gives no timeline, no statement about the original game's status, and no indication of what has changed since readers last saw it. Treating it as a confirmed relaunch with defined features would go beyond what the source supports.

Taken together, issue 791 is a roundup rather than a single story: a site feature, a community game revival, two framework releases with security framing, an interview episode, a challenge recap and a conference calendar. The concrete, checkable items are the Dancer2 version numbers and the MetaCPAN theme; the rest are pointers whose details live in the linked posts, which are outside the supplied evidence.

## Key points

- Perl Weekly issue 791, edited by Gabor Szabo, states that MetaCPAN has a night mode, without describing how it is enabled or when it shipped.
- The issue describes The Lacuna Expanse as returning via a new community-run reboot, linking a post by Natalie Rose and pointing to TLE Community; no date or feature details are given.
- Jason A. Crome is credited with announcing Dancer2 2.2.1 (security) and Dancer2 2.2.0 with a "security updates PLEASE READ" notice, but the extracted text omits vulnerability specifics.
- A reader question in the issue reports that MetaCPAN returns a POD rendering error for WebForms.pm because the requested resource is a binary file; the newsletter does not resolve it.
- Matthias Muth's Challenge 391 write-up documents an O(n²) box-stacking algorithm that sorts by width and updates path lengths, and he states it solves 1000 boxes in under a second on his machine.

## Practical implications — editorial interpretation

Editorial interpretation: Perl developers running Dancer2 should treat the flagged 2.2.0 and 2.2.1 releases as a prompt to review their dependency versions and read the linked security notice, since the newsletter itself urges readers to do so. Developers who read CPAN documentation frequently may want to check whether MetaCPAN's night mode is available in their session, and anyone relying on MetaCPAN's POD rendering for specific distributions should be aware that at least one module, WebForms.pm, is reported to fail with a binary-file error.

## Limitations and unknowns

The evidence consists of a newsletter roundup and one linked repository README, not primary release notes or vendor advisories. The Dancer2 security details, affected versions and remediation steps are not included. MetaCPAN's night mode has no documented rollout date, scope or configuration method in the supplied text. The Lacuna Expanse reboot is described only in the newsletter's own words, with no launch date, operator details or feature list. The WebForms rendering error is reproduced as a reader question and is unresolved. Challenge 391 write-up descriptions are the newsletter's characterisations of third-party posts, not independent reviews, and most linked posts were not examined. The box-stacking performance figure is the author's own statement about his machine, not a benchmark we ran.

## Sources

- [1] dev.to: Perl 🐪 Weekly #791 - The Dark Side is here!
  https://dev.to/szabgab/perl-weekly-791-the-dark-side-is-here-ona
  Retrieved: 2026-09-25T10:16:09.836Z
- [2] github.com: README.md
  https://github.com/manwar/perlweeklychallenge-club/blob/master/challenge-391/matthias-muth/README.md
  Retrieved: 2026-09-25T10:16:10.672Z

## Claim references

- Perl Weekly issue 791 states that MetaCPAN has a night mode. [source 1]
- The newsletter describes The Lacuna Expanse as a new community-run reboot and links a post by Natalie Rose. [source 1]
- Jason A. Crome is credited with announcing Dancer2 2.2.1 as a security release and Dancer2 2.2.0 with a security-updates notice. [source 1]
- The newsletter reports a MetaCPAN error stating that POD rendering for WebForms.pm failed because the requested resource is a binary file. [source 1]
- Perl Weekly Challenge 392 sets the tasks Convert Palindrome and Words Length Product, with a $50 prize and a monthly champion sponsored by Marc Perry. [source 1]
- Matthias Muth's Challenge 391 write-up documents an O(n²) box-stacking algorithm and states it solves 1000 boxes in under a second on his machine. [source 2]