This Week on perl5-porters (17-23 March 2003)
This week -- well, I have to admit that, if I wasn't writing these
summaries, I'd have forgotten most the of things that happened this week :
because it was busy. Read on for the short notes I've taken about all
those recent developments -- pack(), FETCH()es, threads port, et alii.
pack() changes
Wolfgang Laun sent a new version of his patches to pack() and unpack(),
which were integrated into the development and the maintenance versions
of perl. See the impressive detail of improvements in his message :
http://archive.develooper.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg93325.html
XS++
Salvador Fandiņo sent a patch to MakeMaker to allow to use C++/XS source
files with a .xss filename extension. These will produce .cpp files that
will be compiled by the C++ compiler of choice.
http://archive.develooper.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg93406.html
Fetching while fetching
Miko O'Sullivan reports (bug #21602) a complicated but interesting bug
with tied hashes accessed from within FETCH methods of other tied
hashes. Dave Mitchell knows about this bug already, which is caused by
"the internal implementation of ties using a shared global variable",
which can't be considered clean. Nicholas Clark encourages Dave to write
a fix, and Miko to write a regression test.
http://archive.develooper.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg93355.html
Threaded Cygwin
Great news : Perl with ithreads now compiles on Cygwin ! and only one
regression test fails (something in the guts of MakeMaker).
http://archive.develooper.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg93417.html
rcatline bug
Matt Sergeant remarked that the internal "rcatline" operator (that
appends to a variable a line read from a filehandle), new in perl 5.8.0,
is sometimes broken, and therefore breaks some code. Enache Adrian
provided a fix.
http://archive.develooper.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg93454.html
Force failure of a regexp
Jonathan Stiles asks for a way to assert a failure in a regular
expression. Hugo gives an example that inserts the constants
our $fail = qr{(?!)};
our $succeed = qr{(?=)};
into "(??{...})" blocks. Enache Adrian recalls the "fail" builtin
described in Apocalypse 5, wondering if it could be backported to Perl 5.
http://archive.develooper.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg93505.html
Unbalanced string table refcount
Paul Dyer reports bug #21614, about the internal warning "Unbalanced
string table refcount" being issued under mod_perl. It's not really
clear whether it's a mod_perl-specific problem, since it wasn't
successfully reproduced with a standalone perl interpreter. Nicholas
Clark, however, is able to reproduce a memory access error with perl
5.8.0 (but not with maint- or bleadperl), and even able (apparently) to
understand what's going on.
http://archive.develooper.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg93433.html
Maintsnap
Jarkko Hietaniemi released a snapshot of maintperl. He hasn't worked on
perldelta yet, but a list of changes since the last snapshot can be
found at :
http://archive.develooper.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg93488.html
Other news with no title
Marek Rouchal remarks that the bytecode compiler/loader is broken with
perl 5.8.0. Enache Adrian submits a patch to solve one of the most
obvious problems : it's not up to date with some of the recent changes
to the core.
http://archive.develooper.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg93336.html
Stas Bekman asks why one can redefine the active subroutine, but not
undefine it. So far, nobody knows.
Last week, I summarized that Inline::C wasn't working with bleadperl and
maintperl ; the patch to be blamed for this has been found, it's an
innocent-looking regexp bug fix (#18533). Waiting for a proper cure to
be found, this patch has been withdrawn from maintperl. Hopefully Inaba
Hiroto proposed a patch.
About this summary
This summary was brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly
summaries are available on http://use.perl.org/ and/or via a mailing
list, which subscription address is [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Comments, corrections, additions, and suggestions are welcome.
