This Week on perl5-porters (19-25 April 2004)
The rhythm of maintenance releases is now well established, and this
week saw the release of perl 5.8.4, as expected. Meanwhile, the usual
stream of bugs and patches continued.
5.8.4
Perl 5.8.4 was released. The new setuidperl executable which was present
in RC2 was finally withdrawn; the new plan is to have suidperl installed
as a hard link to perl, and sperl5.8.4 being the actual set-uid
executable. (See the latest perldelta for the details.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040422155622.GN701%40plum.flirble.org
http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-5.8.4/pod/perl584delta.pod
New compiler to port perl on
Yves Orton tells the crowd about the newly released command-line
compiler by Microsoft, available as a free download. Follows some
remarks on how to build perl on Windows with it, and what are the odds
and ends of the differents versions of Microsoft's compilers.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=71B318898201D311845C0008C75DAD1C0A44CD19%40defra1ex2
Duplicated code
Nicholas Clark ran a tool to find duplicated code on the perl source
code; and it seems that there's some room for refactorization. As he
writes, "quite a bit is duplication between code in the win32, wince and
netware subdirectories."
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040422162152.GO701%40plum.flirble.org
Use of uninitialized $foo in...
Dave Mitchell commited to bleadperl his patch to enhance the "Use of
uninitialized value" warning by adding the name of the variable or
array/hash subscript, if any, which was uninitiliazed. Nicholas Clark
wonders if it's applicable to the perl 5.8.x branch, but Dave points out
that it's likely to cause spurious test failures in various CPAN
modules. Notably, he had to patch several core tests corresponding to
CPAN modules to make them cope with the new form of the warning.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040423212027.GA3051%40iabyn.com
Patches
Marcus Holland-Moritz committed a patch to add the support in pack()
templates for the "<" and ">" modifiers which were discussed in a
previous summary. He has some questions on some oddities of the
implementation, but nobody commented. (Anybody has a Cray handy?)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040423063124.3c717a6b%40r2d2
Jeff Pinyan proposed a patch to bleadperl to enhance perl's Unicode
tables, notably for a better compliance.
Stas Bekman supplied a patch to log the perl interpreter address in
internal warnings emitted by a multithreaded perl.
In brief
Jay Hannah is surprised by the fact that sort() in scalar context
doesn't return any useful value (more precisely when it's used as the
last thing in a function that gets called in scalar context). Randal
Schwartz points out that there is no such thing as a list value in
scalar context, and gives a list of builtins commonly used in a list
context, and what special value they return in a scalar context.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=003e01c42886$6605ee90$4722000a%40omarests2
David Manura found a bug related to the pos() corresponding to a match
done on a reference to a substr() lvalue. Probably some magic that is
not cleaned as it should, according to Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4084A038.80304%40math2.org
Mark Jason-Dominus reports that File::Find doesn't detect dangling
symlinks when the option "follow_fast" is used (bug #28929).
About this summary
This summary was written, in the hope you enjoy it, 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] Comments and corrections welcome.
