This Week on perl5-porters (16-22 September 2002)
That's on a week like this that you realize that lots of porters are
European (and managed to free themselves for YAPC::Europe.) Or were
they, on the contrary, too busy in the big blue room ? On the other
hand, the number of bug reports stayed at its habitual average level.
Pedantic compilation
Jarkko Hietaniemi provided a patch to add the -ansi -pedantic flags for
gcc on core C files. This triggered a bit of discussion, as those B&D
flags will be useful for the porters only, but may cause trouble to
casual users who want to compile perl on less common platforms. Jarkko
then reworked his patch so -ansi -pedantic get enabled only if
"-Dgccansipedantic" is passed to Configure.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-09/msg00720.html
Default install location
Jarkko also proposed that the Configure symbol "installusrbinperl"
should be turned off by default. Currently, unless "-Uinstallusrbinperl"
is passed to Configure, (or if you're building a development version), a
copy of perl will be installed in "/usr/bin/perl", overwriting any
previous (and maybe vendor-supplied) version, and regardless the
installation prefix you passed to Configure.
Jarkko's idea was followed by a massive approval. He then offered a
patch that *defaults to not overwriting /usr/bin/perl if one exists, but
it will still default to creating one if one does not exist.*
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020919035818.GE178196%40lyta.hut.fi
Closures in BEGIN blocks don't feel OK
Rafael Garcia-Suarez proposed to the audience a coredump case :
BEGIN { $f = sub { eval $_[0] } }
$bar = "ok\n";
print $f->( '$bar' ) ;
The cause of the coredump wasn't difficult to trace : the memory for the
BEGIN block has been free'd, and the closure still refers to the
non-existent lexical scope of the enclosing BEGIN block, where it looks
for $bar -- provoking a core dump.
The problem, still not solved, is to figure out what is the right thing
perl has to do in this case (and in some other similar cases, e.g. when
there's a lexical $bar in the BEGIN block.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020917232515.7c413109.rgarciasuarez%40free.fr
perlopentut
Andy Lester courageously began to work on the perlopentut manpage, that
wasn't actually up-to-date with the last improvements that were made on
the open() syntax. He produced three successive versions of a patch,
introducing to perlopentut the 3-arg form of open() and the indirect
(lexical) filehandles.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020919154346.GA11114%40petdance.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020920035935.GA13547%40petdance.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020920172341.GA15672%40petdance.com
Smoke effort
Alain Barbet continued to produce huge smoke reports, adding new
compilers to his list (now with Borland on Windows). He also suggested
to build a web-accessible database of smoke builds. And not only
suggested. He actually provided a draft application containing his
results. Thanks Alain !
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3D8DB756.3090104%40jupiter.alianet
In brief
H.Merijn Brand provided a patch to remove the support for "-DLEAKTEST",
which was broken anyway (see previous week's summary).
John Peacock told us that he was in the process of releasing a v-string
module, "version.pm", to CPAN. As he says, *the code is intended to be
basically 100% equivalent to the code which will be included in 5.10*,
but backported to perl 5.005_03 ! (or should it be v5.5.3 now ?)
Abhijit Menon-Sen, who was rare on the list these few last months,
rapidly fixed obscure bug #17375 ("$r .= <FH>" not working properly when
$r has been undefined.)
The person who reported bug #17422 -- the RT system didn't gave his name
-- reported that the GLOB_NOCASE flag of File::Glob doesn't appear to
have any effect when one wants to glob a wildcard pattern that doesn't
contain a wildcard character. Rafael Garcia-Suarez suggested that this
might be the desired behavior. No further comments were made.
Another memory leak problem with shared arrays has been reported (bug
#17460). In fact this problem is already known and will be hopefully
fixed by an upcoming release of the threads::* modules on CPAN.
H.Merijn Brand is now officially the Configure pumpking (and that's a
scary task). The new mailing list perl5-build (at the usual domain) will
be dedicated to discussions about Configure and metaconfig (the tool
used to generate the Configure script).
About this summary
This summary brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez, from Lyon, France,
a city that's not that close to Munich. It's also available via a
mailing list, which subscription address is
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
