This Week on perl5-porters (11-17 November 2002)
I finally found time to produce a new instance of this weekly selection.
Read about Unicode chars in POD, an incompatible change in a widely (and
wisely) used module, a couple of new proposals, and a smaller than usual
amount of bugs.
Non-ASCII in POD
A thread was spawned from the B::Lint patch proposed by Ian Phillipps
last week. It's about non-ASCII chars in PODs (for example, �).
Apparently, some versions of nroff(1) are offended by characters with an
ASCII code > 127, and "pod2man" should generate portable manpages
(although Russ Allbery said that he was considering a way to add an
option to "pod2man" to generate groff-specific manpages). Sean M. Burke
suggested to use the Pod::Escapes module to get rid of escape sequences
that can't be handled in the output format, and added some insight about
what the POD specification says on Unicode input.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg88955.html
Test::* modules change
Michael G. Schwern released a new alpha version of
Test::Simple/More/Builder. An important change is that "threads.pm" is
no longer automatically loaded on an ithread-enabled perl. Hence it will
be necessary to "use thread" *before* loading Test::More or
Test::Builder to run tests that use threads.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg88939.html
Assertions in Perl
Salvador Fandino send an impressive patch to add assertion support to
Perl. Briefly, a new sub attribute "assertion" is used to mark subs as
assertions, and those assertions are enabled via a new command-line
switch, "-A". Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes found that it's a great idea. The
pumpking hasn't commented on this yet.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg88948.html
CPAN::MakeMaker
Brian Ingerson posted an announcement of his CPAN::MakeMaker module on
P5P last month, and didn't receive any comments until this week,
probably because the implications of this awesome hack are difficult to
figure out at first sight.
CPAN::MakeMaker is a replacement for ExtUtils::MakeMaker. It's also
self-distributing : it's part of the MakeMaker-generated tarball, hence
doesn't need to be installed on the users' systems -- in fact it gets
never installed on the users' systems.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg88476.html
http://search.cpan.org/author/INGY/CPAN-MakeMaker/lib/CPAN/MakeMaker.pod
Version bug
Andreas Koenig apparently found a bug in "version.pm". Basically he
states that
use version;
$v = version->new(5.00563);
print $v->numify;
should print "5.00563", and not "5.005063", since it should be
equivalent to 5.5.630, and not to 5.5.63. The correct interpretation of
the relevant chapter and verse of perl56delta are required to define the
proper behavior.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg89059.html
In brief
Sean M. Burke announced a shinier, "refactored, and generally
refunkified" version of the "perldoc" utility, available from CPAN if
you want to test it. It's of course aimed at replacing the current
"perldoc".
Bug #18306 shows that B::Xref sometimes reports random file names with a
threaded perl. Apparently the problem comes from the perl core, not from
B::Xref.
Dave Mitchell sent a patch to add more information to the infamous error
message "Scalars leaked", by printing the adresses of the leaked
scalars. It's enabled by the new preprocessor symbol
"DEBUG_LEAKING_SCALARS".
H.Merijn Brand still chases Cygwin bugs through a deep smoke screen.
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