This Week on perl5-porters (31 May / 6 June 2004)
As I've advertised the weekly P5P summaries during the French Perl
Workshop, I feel compelled to continue to write them each week... Read
on for the latest batch of commented links.
Smaller tarball
Nicholas Clark, enhancing Jeff "japhy" Pinyan's improvements to the
Unicode data tables, makes them generated at perl compile time. This
way, an unpacked clean source tree is 1.6 MB lighter.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040531151254.GX1147%40plum.flirble.org
However, this produced some problems with builds on Windows using the
dmake utility: the build now works, thanks to Steve Hay, but dmake
tends to build things several times unnecessarily.
Data::Dumper and hooks
Gaal Yahas proposed to allow Data::Dumper to call methods on objects
it dumps, if these methods exists, to produce a class-specific
customized dump. Comments were posted.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040604141439.GI647%40sike.forum2.org
$SIG{FOO} = undef
Dave Mitchell proposed that assigning undef to a signal handler does
the same thing as assigning 'DEFAULT': restore the default handler. Nick
Ing-Simmons remembers that in the past, this question was discussed:
shouldn't it set the signal handler to 'IGNORE' instead?
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040604151423.GA1896%40iabyn.com
fork() at compile-time
Robin Barker reported that on Solaris, forking in a BEGIN block seems to
repeat the remaining parts of the script twice, even though the child
process exited immediately (bug #30040). Nicholas Clark's advice is to
use POSIX::_exit() instead of perl's exit(). Ton Hospel suggests an
explanation.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=c9sa2u$uk4$3%40post.home.lunix
Thread leaks
Two thread-related memory leaks were reported: one involving join(), by
Andrew Savige (#30063), and one involving nested arrays, by Eric Garland
(#30066).
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.9-30063-89801.3.14458478683115%40perl.org
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.9-30066-89809.5.74912811298226%40perl.org
Double DESTROY
Ton Hospel produces a small code snippet where an object, stored in a
hash, is destroyed *twice* -- that's certainly one time too many. (Bug
#30061).
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.9-30061-89788.12.6990632560854%40perl.org
Memory wrapping
Calle Dybedahl finds that the new error messages emitted for large
allocations of strings are not emitted in some cases. Jarkko Hietamieni
provided patches.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=86smdb8y27.fsf%40ulthar.bisexualmenace.org
In Brief
Ken Williams announced a new beta of Module::Build on CPAN. Testers (and
patches, but you know that) are welcome.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=F5F32715-B452-11D8-9FAD-000A95BD9874%40mathforum.org
Sadahiro Tomoyuki fixed bug #29841 (see last week's summary), about the
"-T" taint checks flag modifying the behaviour of perl regarding
utf8::decode(). This function, however, is considered as experimental
and better suited for internal use.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040606003344.57B2.BQW10602%40nifty.com
Oddly enough, this week there were several bugs reports concerning bugs
that were already fixed, either in perl 5.8.4, in perl 5.8.5-to-be, or
bleadperl.
About this summary
This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez, from the French Perl
Workshop, a.k.a Journées Perl 2004. 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.
