As I look at possibly helping to fill out the missing Perl exercises, I compared those which I have completed (all 82 currently available) with the exercises in “https://github.com/exercism/problem-specifications/exercises”. However, I then noticed that several of these are already defined, but return “Error: You have not unlocked this exercise” if I try to download them on the CLI. Moreover, I’m pretty sure that I have completed several of these in the past.
If I manually substitute the name of one of these exercise into the URL for an exercise that is available (eg. Beer Song in Perl on Exercism) it does show the exercise, but says:
### Unlock Beer Song
This exercise is currently unavailable for you to start. Complete the following exercises to unlock Beer Song or *disable learning mode*.
The button to disable learning mode will set the track to “practice mode” but does not impact whether these exercises are available.
From the source code, these exercises appear to have not been updated to use the ‘lib’ and ‘t’ sub-directories, but I otherwise haven’t dug in any further to see what impact this has on their availability.
I’m curious if porting these exercises is desired or not. It seems that they may require minimal changes in order to get them ready for publishing again, but perhaps there is a reason that they were not ported with all of the others? They do seem to be available for other tracks.
If they are pending additional changes, I may be able to help.
Oh! Yes! You are correct! I just noticed that they are flagged as deprecated here also:
This seems to account for the majority of the hidden exercises. So perhaps it is more the case that some other tracks are behind on deprecating exercises rather than Perl missing them. For instance, Bash still has beer-song. Or is there some other methodology to determine that beer-song is still a relevant lesson for Bash, but not for Perl?
Note that if I exclude those with a .deprecated file, then the only exercises that I still cannot download are:
linked-list
simple-linked-list
These instead are marked as "status": "wip" in the root config.json.
Beer song has been replaced with bottle song. There is no reason bash would still use beer song and not bottle song. I’ll try to fix that over this weekend, if my co-maintainers don’t beat me to it.
linked-list and simple-linked-list are two exercises which existed well before the exercise generator and online test runner. They’re due a rebuild but when I do have free time I try to prioritize building on the syllabus first. I think linked-list was also created before canonical data existed for the exercise.