This Week on perl5-porters (2-8 September 2002)
As September begins, the perl5-porters, ignoring the changing weather,
continue to work. This week, some small things, and a few bigger ones,
are selected in the report. Read below.
Precision on CLONEs
Elizabeth Mattijsen found that, while executing a CLONE method (the hook
to support cloning of data when new threads are created), "threads->tid"
returns the thread id of the original thread. This is because the
cloning is actually performed (at the C level) in the parent thread.
However, to execute some routine when a new thread starts, and from this
new thread, a workaround is to hijack "threads::new". Nick Ing-Simmons
also suggested to implement some sort of post-clone handler via another
special subroutine (for example CLONED).
A point on v-strings
John Peacock, the man who courageously continues to struggle with
v-strings, posted a *restatement of current objections to version
objects* -- version objects being what the v-strings should be compiled
to internally by perl, in order to make them less unusable.
The thread is worth a read if you are annoyed by v-strings and if you
want to have some idea on how they're likely to change.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3D73752A.701%40rowman.com
To quote Hugo, *Larry continues to like them* [the v-strings] *despite
various attempts to convince him otherwise, so they are here to stay. I
think they could become much less of a bugbear if John's sterling work
culminates in a consistent and appropriately documented set of
behaviours.* Waiting for the v-string objects Apocalypse...
Pseudo-hashes should warn before they die
Now that pseudo-hashes are removed from bleadperl, Gurusamy Sarathy
noticed that using them doesn't trigger any deprecation warning in perl
5.8.0. Jarkko is considering adding one in perl 5.8.1.
Benjamin Goldberg also started a thread on the implementation-to-be of
the "fields" pragma in perl 5.10.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3D797B2F.2B9B6B10%40earthlink.net
Jaguar and Camel
Jarkko Hietaniemi found out that Perl 5.8.0 doesn't compile on Mac OS X
10.2 with the August update of the Developers Tools, due to a small
communication problem between the Configure script and Apple's modified
gcc 3. He also provided a fix for that, which you can grab here if you
need it :
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-09/msg00403.html
*Last minute update* : has Jarkko dreamed ? have the sunspots moved ?
He's apparently no longer able to reproduce this bug.
In brief
Abe Timmerman is now the official maintainer of Test::Smoke. See
http://qa.perl.org/ for more info about smoke testing.
Steve Piner reported an (already known, IIRC) bug : "my $x; our $x;"
doesn't generate a warning, whereas "our $x; my $x;" does. (Bug #16922.)
H.Merijn Brand, doing some speed experiments, *found that perlio has
slowed down considerably compared to stdio from 17805 to 17821*. No
confirmation or comment was issued.
Allen Smith provided some patches to bleadperl and to perl 5.8.0 to
improve IRIX support, namely on long doubles, and their handling by
"s?printf()".
The perl5-changes mailing list now carries the changes committed by
Hugo, and all previously dropped changes have been sent back to it, for
the purpose of archiving.
Sadahiro Tomoyuki released a new version (0.23) of Unicode::Collate.
Elizabeth Mattijsen, after having uploaded a first version of
"Thread::Exit" on CPAN, found that "POSIX::_exit()" makes perl hang on
Linux when called from within a thread (bug #17057). This problem is
probably related to the Linux implementation of threads.
Elizabeth emitted the idea to start a new FAQ section on threads.
Hugo is leaving for Zurich (the Perl 6 mini-conference) and to Munich
(YAPC::Europe).
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