pumpking
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English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Blend of pumpkin + king, anecdotally from the use of a stuffed pumpkin toy that was handed between employees as a token of permission to make changes, ensuring that only one person could make changes at any particular time.[1]
Pronunciation
[edit]- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˈpʌm(p)kɪŋ/
- (General American) IPA(key): /ˈpʌm(p)ˌkɪŋ/
Audio (General Australian): (file) - Hyphenation: pump‧king
Noun
[edit]pumpking (plural pumpkings)
- (programming, slang) A Perl user working on shared source code who has been temporarily designated as the only person who is allowed to make changes. [from late 20th c.]
- 1999 winter, Nathan Torkington, “Hacking the Perl Core”, in The Perl Journal[2], volume 4, number 4 (number 16 overall), Boston, Mass.: Readable Publications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 31 October 2020:
- In addition, various people are pumpkings for different areas. For example, Andy Dougherty and Jarkko Hietaniemi share the Configure pumpkin, and Tom Christiansen is the documentation pumpking.
- 2000, Simon Cozens, with Peter Wainwright, Beginning Perl, Birmingham, West Midlands: Wrox Press, →ISBN, page 24:
- Releases are coordinated by a ‘patch pumpkin holder’, or ‘pumpking’ – a quality controller who, with help from Larry [Wall], decides which contributions make the grade and when and bears the heavy responsibility of releasing a new Perl.
- 2002, Clinton Pierce, “Basic Perl”, in Charlotte Clapp, editor, Perl Developer’s Dictionary, Indianapolis, Ind.: Sams Publishing, →ISBN, page 6:
- Each release of Perl is assigned a "pumpking." This person controls all changes to the actual source code of the language itself. The pumpking for 5.6 was Gurusamy Sarathy, and the pumpking for 5.8 is Jarkko Hietaniemi.
- 2005, Scott Walters, Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated with Perl 5 (Expert’s Voice in Open Source), Berkeley, Calif.: Apress, →ISBN, page xxii:
- Thanks to Doug Miles, the Phoenix Perl Mongers Pumpking, for his tireless dedication to the Phoenix Perl community, which he brought together. Writing Perl in the valley would be a lot lonelier without his hard work.
Translations
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ See Jarkko Hietaniemi (2007?) “perlhist”, in Perldoc – the Official Perl 5.32.0 Documentation Site[1], archived from the original on 16 September 2020:
- David Croy once told me that at a previous job, there was one tape drive and multiple systems that used it for backups. But instead of some high-tech exclusion software, they used a low-tech method to prevent multiple simultaneous backups: a stuffed pumpkin. No one was allowed to make backups unless they had the “backup pumpkin”. [...] The name has stuck. The holder of the pumpkin is sometimes called the pumpking (keeping the source afloat?) or the pumpkineer (pulling the strings?).
