From the world renowned center of reality, comes this week's Perl 5 Porters Weekly Review. After enjoying free pastry way too much at the 100 year anniversary of the local bakery, this summary should be a light meal to prepare.
More info on undefined warnings
Dave Mitchell reported that he was working on a patch that would refine the warning for using undefined values, by adding variable name, and even better, which hash key or array index contained the undef value. His worry was that it might be a security hole. Reference was made to the recent changes in Apache log handling (where newlines are now escaped). The consensus seemed to be that it was ok to show as much as possible, as long as the output was sanitized, and possibly should be UTF-8 aware.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=74bb3a81236c4928
What version are you?
Stas Bekman asked for a way to find out whether a module is available in a specific version _without_ actually loading it. Rafael suggested ExtUtils::MM_Unix->parse_version, Merijn came up with "V", which oddly enough, does _not_ live on CPAN. Anyways, the original question turned into several issues related to taint and whether or not it is save to execute a part of a file which you would otherwise require.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=7aed3c0739a668a http://search.cpan.org/~mschwern/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/ http://www.test-smoke.org/perl/noncpan.shtml
UNIVERSAL::VERSION broken?
Stas was busy this week. A bug report about UNIVERSAL::VERSION being broken in 5.9.x opened the can of worms yet again that is consistent version checking in different versions of Perl. What generated this, was a bug report to the mod_perl 2 list which stated version 3.40 of CGI had been used. This caused Stas to lose some hair. John Peacock explained why this may have been confusing, but still technically correct. And in the end, there was a patch that will hopefully wind up on CPAN soon.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=f15911eb2e696379 http://search.cpan.org/~jpeacock/version/
Enhancing Hash::Util
Yves Orton sollicited comments about additional features for Hash::Util, specifically related to locked hashes. Some nice new features were suggested and of course, one should have a look at Yves' Data::Dump::Streamer module.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=c9e0ec38159844a http://search.cpan.org/~yves/Data-Dump-Streamer/
Perl 5.8.4-RC1-tobesomedaybutnotjustnow
Nicholas Clark released a 5.8.4 snapshot for all of you to test. The code freeze for 5.8.4 is at March 31, 23:59:59 GMT, which is _one_ second before April 1st. But I'm sure Nick means business when he says nothing will go in after that. Quickly scanning through the changelog, reveals that 5.8.4 will have stacked filetest operators, fixes to Storable, Math::BigInt, a speedup for Unicode case mapping and many, many other fixes and documentation updates.
http://groups.google.com/groups?th=556d9f7d2566cf9e http://opensource.fotango.com/perl/perl-22588.tar.bz2
In brief:
Some spam seeped through to the list this week. Thanks again to all of the good folks who manage to keep the barrage of virus infested mail from the list the rest of the time!
Many bug reports were made, and some of them were quickly resolved or at least acknowledged. But as Robert Spier mentioned two weeks ago, the number of open tickets is still increasing. So if you feel so inclined, please have a look at the open tickets and help the perl5 porters by aiding in resolving the open issues at hand.
About this summary
This summary was written by Elizabeth Mattijsen, from Echt, The Netherlands while Rafael is getting settled in Paris. Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, which subscription address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] Comments and corrections are welcome.
