This Week on perl5-porters (2-8 December 2002)
This week, besides some bug reports involving UTF8 locales, the porters
discussed a wide range of subjects, from Mathematics to English, not
forgetting about some old Unix thingies, such as system calls and
termcaps.
Alisiasing magic variables (in English.pm)
Kevin Moore reported bug #18874 : sometimes, with perl 5.8.0, the $&
variable is not correctly aliased to $MATCH. Andreas Koenig's little
gnomes quickly identified the patch that introduced this regression, and
it was reverted, with a proper regression test added. The root cause of
the bug is apparently that aliasing variables (via "*MATCH = \$&")
doesn't work as well with magic than aliasing globs ("*MATCH = *&"). In
other words, it's a can of worms.
Mathematics
Tels was busy this week on the Math::Big* modules. He fixed several
bugs, and apparently his fixes led to performance improvements. I won't
summarize Tels' eloquent missive, so here it is :
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg89601.html
He also worked on the square root and nth root functions. Nobody
commented on his work, but I think that's because (1) these modules are
scary, (2) mathematics are scary, (3) quoting Tels, "the deeper you dig,
the more sh*t you find."
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg89639.html
getservbyport
Alan Burlison found that getservbyport(), unlike getservbyname(),
doesn't accept an empty string as its second argument (the protocol).
This is not consistent (and not consistent with the getservent(3)
manpage.) Slaven Rezic provided a fix.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg89644.html
$ENV{TERM} and taint checks
After some discussion on the causes of bug #18717, Rafael Garcia-Suarez
put in minor change in the set of characters that are considered to be
safe in $ENV{TERM} regarding the tainting mechanism. Now, if you run
perl with -T, and if your terminal name contains a character which is
non-alphanumeric and not in "[-_.+]", perl will consider $ENV{TERM}
tainted.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg89431.html
More UTF8 locale bugs
UTF8-locale-related bugs continue to flood the porters. Wilbur
Goltermann reported bug #18857, about a "s///" substitution that fails
with a coredump, under a UTF8 locale. Vilem Marsik reported a bug in the
perl debugger (#18915) that appears to be related to a capturing regexp
that doesn't like UTF8. Bug #18931, reported by Bhavesh Davda, is about
a "\U...\E" expression not behaving correctly, also under an UFT8
locale. It seems to be related as well to regular expressions. Last but
not least, warnings reported by perl are not UTF8-aware
(bug-#5956-revival).
ExtUtils::ParseXS
Ken Williams is working on converting xsubpp (the part of MakeMaker that
preprocesses XS files to C code) into a module, for which he proposed
the name ExtUtils::ParseXS. He explains : "The reason I'm doing this is
so that the functionality can be used in other contexts, other
platforms, and other build environments like Module::Build." Brian
Ingerson found the idea interesting for Inline::C.
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg89698.html
In brief
Hugo van der Sanden integrated into the core the new version of perldoc
(and the relevant Pod::Perldoc::* modules), by Sean M. Burke. (This new
perldoc is also available from the CPAN.)
Nicholas Clark fixed the bug (#18651) reported last week, pertaining to
restricted hashes.
Rafael fixed three obscure memory corruption bugs in the lexer, and
apparently found some other ones.
About this summary
This summary brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez, both on
http://use.perl.org/ and via a mailing list, which subscription address
is [EMAIL PROTECTED] Comments and corrections are, as
always, welcome.
