This week on perl5-porters (19-25 August 2002)
I guess those thunderstorms came. And how they came. From an even wetter
than normal country on the shores of the North Sea, comes this weeks
perl5-porters summary.
Credit where credit's due
I misinterpreted Gerrit P. Haase contribution to Time::HiRes last week.
It was in fact Jarkko Hietaniemi who has done the work. It's good to
know Jarkko is still with us, after all the good work he's done as the
5.8.0 pumpkin. Thanks to Gerrit for pointing this out to me.
Errata
It would seem that perlbug reports do appear on nntp.perl.org. I don't
know what I was on last week, I could have sworn they weren't there.
But, the fact that they don't appear on Google, has been confirmed. Some
kind of header problem is expected, investigations are still continuing.
Config.pm
Nicholas Clark started some discussion about the way Config.pm, the
module that keeps Perl's internal configuration. Over the years, it has
grown to keep quite a lot of information, and choices have been made in
the past to reduce its size and/or CPU needs. Nicholas questions whether
they have all been good ones.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-08/msg00979.html
Goodbye (and hello) to threads
I must have had a bad hair day when I posted this message. Fortunately,
Dave Mitchell, Dan Sugalski and Benjamin Goldberg pointed me to the
errors of my ways. This should turn into a better tutorial for beginning
thread programmers, such as me.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-08/msg01015.html
Big Badda leak in Sockets
Vipul reported a memory leak using sockets. Graham Barr and Nick
Ing-Simmons look into it and confirm that it is a new, fresh 5.8.0 leak
that is related to PerlIO for sockets.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-08/msg01014.html
B::SV::FLAGS dumps core
A bug report by Mark Jason Dominus turned out to be mainly a
documentation deficiency, which will probably lead to a. better
documentation, and b. an OO interface to B::SV.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-08/msg01073.html
Regex optimisations
Chris Ball started a thread on automatically optimizing regular
expressions, which quickly turned into a discussion about proper
benchmarking. Mark Jason Dominus mentioned his Rx module (available from
CPAN), which you could also use to optimize regular expressions.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-08/msg01066.html
Several bugs confirmed with Valgrind
This week I finally installed Valgrind. I guess this tool for checking
memory accesses in programs, can't be plugged enough. Any error report
that involves a segmentation fault, is easily traced back with this gem
of an open source program. Get it and use it! (for x86 systems only,
unfortunately).
http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/
p5p patches
H.Merijn Brand started a thread on the proper way to submit patches to
p5p. Some people prefer -u, other prefer -p. The final consensus (with
appropriate changes to the patching.pod) is to use "-u -p". It starts
here:
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-08/msg01146.html
use less 'memory'
Nicholas Clark's work on COW (Copy-On-Write) strings, caused him to look
at the (currently) dummy pragmatic module "less.pm". Seems there is
still some infrastructure missing before module authors will be able to
optimize their modules for e.g. memory or CPU usage.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-08/msg01170.html
COW
Nicholas Clark has been very busy this week. In an expos� on his work on
COW for perl5, he describes all the (im)possibilities of doing COW.
Impressive. Nobody has dared to go into it (yet). It can be found at:
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-08/msg01226.html
shift // 0 fixed
Rafael marks his return by supplying patches for handling the new //
operator when using functions such as "shift". It would seem the road is
now clear to officially use // as a "defined-or" operator.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-08/msg01252.html
No more Google
Over the two weeks I did this summary, it became clear to me that many
messages from perl5.porters do not appear on groups.google.com. Even
though groups.google.com gives you a better overview of what is going on
in a thread, there's not much point if half of the thread is missing, is
there? I therefore made all the links to the xray machine in Germany. I
hope they'll forgive me there.
About this summary
The summary is brought to you by Elizabeth Mattijsen, while Rafael
Garcia-Suarez has enjoyed a well deserved vacation. It's also available
via mailing list, to which you may subscribe by sending an email to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] .
And yes: I still do threads.
