pumpking

English edit

WOTD – 31 October 2020

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 (AU) (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

Perl user working on shared source code who has been temporarily designated as the only person who is allowed to make changes

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?).