This Week on perl5-porters (12-18 January 2004)
Besides the release of a new maintenance version of perl, this week
passed and carried its usual heterogeneous load of bugs. Read below for
all the details.
5.8.3
Perl 5.8.3 was released (as expected.) The announcement and its
laudatory follow-ups can be seen at:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040114192716.GA13579%40Bagpuss.unfortu.net
Formats improvements
Wolfgang Laun proposed a huge patch implementing many fixes and
improvements to formats. The details are to be found in his
announcement:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=DF27CDCBD2581D4B88431901094E4B4D02B0C4D3%40attmsx1
However one of the tests added by his patch fail on some architectures.
(bug #24927.) This is to be investigated.
In Brief
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes asked some questions about the next development
release of Perl, to be numbered 5.9.1: what features are going to be in
it?
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040111213417.GD2348%40efn.org
It was found that chop() and chomp() mangle UTF-8-encoded strings (bugs
#24888 and #24926). Fixes were proposed.
Abigail found out a complex regular expression that apparently corrupts
memory somehow. (bug #24898). Wolfgang Laun proposed a patch.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24898-69991.2.12654944284594%40perl.org
Thomas Bayen found a very strange bug, (#24905), that was quickly fixed
by Dave Mitchell.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24905-70016.12.3769365894331%40perl.org
Bug #24914 demonstrates a case of segmentation fault involving closures.
Dave Mitchell proposed a fix, but it turned out to be unperfect, causing
a regression test to hang under some conditions.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24914-70050.17.1879051837409%40perl.org
Merijn Brand notices that the line
open my $fs, $path or return;
produces a warning 'Parentheses missing around "my" list'. This warning
is actually produced by the perl parser by using some rough heuristics,
for which Sadahiro Tomoyuki proposed an improvement.
Steve Grazzini reports that
sub f : unique {}
is a quick and efficient way to make perl segfault. (bug #24940.)
About this summary
This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are
published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, which
subscription address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corrections
and comments are welcome.
