This Week on perl5-porters (24-30 March 2003)
This week was a rather interesting week among the Perl 5 porters. Read
about pattern matching extensions, CPAN distribution issues, and various
bugs and problems.
New regexp flag proposed
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes proposed a new flag, "/w", to modify the return
value of the pattern match operator in list context. Basically it
prepends the value of $& to the list of returned values "($1..$n)".
Rafael Garcia-Suarez and Merijn Brand asked about the implied constructs
"qr//w" and "/(?w)/" : these shouldn't be allowed since "/w" affects the
return value of the match, not the pattern itself.
Tim Conrow pointed out that "/w" conflicts with the Perl 6 switch of the
same name. Jos Boumans proposed "/r" instead. A new version of the patch
is in the works.
http://xrl.us/e9v
A warnings.pm for old perls
Nicholas Clark forwards to P5P an idea of Simon Wistow : to release a
dummy "warnings" module to CPAN, so that using lexical warnings in a
module doesn't also mandate at least perl 5.6.0. Stas Bekman then
proposes to create a Perl-Backport distribution, aimed at installing
various back-compatibility stubs based on the current perl's version. As
he says, "CPAN module authors just need to include Perl::Backport in
their PREREQ_PM and it'll do the rest of the job."
http://xrl.us/e9w
A generic solution for dual-life CPAN packages
Stas Bekman made a proposal to help the CPAN indexer to distinguish
between the different distributions that provide a specific package, and
to decide which one should be installed by CPAN.pm / CPANPLUS. His idea
is to introduce a new variable, say $CPAN_MASTER_PACKAGE, to hold the
name of the master distribution containing a module. An alternative
option would be to include a file BUNDLED in the distribution, to list
all packages that are to be ignored by the indexer.
Andreas Koenig points out that the contents of the inc/ subdirectories
of CPAN distributions are currently ignored by the indexer. For example,
only-0.26 and PAR-0.66 come with Autrijus Tang's Module::Install
distributed under inc/. Autrijus notes that the "inc" name is not yet
definitive and should not be relied upon. He also liked Stas' BUNDLED
file idea and suggested that this file could use the MANIFEST.SKIP
syntax (i.e. "^inc/" to excludes files from inc/).
http://xrl.us/e9x
In brief
John L. Allen has problems compiling Perl 5.8.0 on AIX with long doubles
with the latest version of IBM's compiler (vac). Apparently Configure
isn't getting right the modfl support. He's working on this with Merijn.
http://xrl.us/e9z
Doug Thayer reports a case of segfault, using GDBM in a threaded program
(bug #21699). Arthur Bergman says that the fix is probably to make GDBM
thread aware.
http://xrl.us/e92
Jean Forget reminds us that he put on CPAN an alpha version of an
enhanced diagnostics module, containing bug fixes and support for
internationalization. Wolfgang Laun announces that he'll have a look at
it.
http://xrl.us/e93
Michael G Schwern announced a new alpha release of MakeMaker (version
6.06_03, then 6.06_04). Testers welcome.
http://xrl.us/e94
He also reported bug #21742 : encountering a "require Foo::Bar"
statement invoked in void context and from an "eval(STRING)" statement,
perl 5.8.0 isn't able to compute correctly the module's return value,
because it provides a wrong context for it. (The correct context to be
provided would be scalar context, and perl actually provides void
context in this case.)
http://xrl.us/e95
Juerd reports bug #21744 about B::Deparse. A code snippet is worth a
dozen words :
$ perl -MO=Deparse -e'print "${foo}::bar"'
print "$foo::bar";
Enache Adrian (which I haven't already mentioned, although he posted a
load of bug fixes this week, as usual) provides a fix.
http://xrl.us/e96
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