This Week on perl5-porters (5-11 July 2004)
Perl 5.8.5 approaches, and the two release candidates of this week prove
it.
Release candidates
Nicholas Clark released the first release candidate of 5.8.5 on
Wednesday. Rafael noticed that the regression tests of Gtk2 weren't
passing. This was because Gtk2 converts every string to UTF-8
internally, and the internal function to upgrade an SV to UTF-8 was no
longer accepting "undef" as an argument. Rafael provided a patch, which
promptly led to RC2 (on Friday). Later, it was found that RC2 caused
problems with Tk, for more or less the same reasons; Nick Ing-Simmons
was working on this second problem.
RC1: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040707103215.GT784%40plum.flirble.org
RC2:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040709104542.GA1424%40plum.flirble.org
Bad warning
Yves Orton noticed the relatively new warning, "Newline in
left-justified string for sprintf", and disapproves it, arguing that it
is of little value for developers and forces to disable the "printf"
warning category only to silence it. However, it won't be removed from
the upcoming 5.8.5, since code is frozen. Hugo van der Sanden posted
some remarks on revamping the way warning categories work on perlmonks.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=E471ED2DFD9353458E8B75FD6D6B03071ADE9A%40defra1ex4.wcom.de
http://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=373005
Debugger restart
Tim Bunce and Andrew Pimlott report that the "R" command of the debugger
(restart) leaves filehandles open, and this causes problems with
databases connections. Andrew sent a patch to fix the problem.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040709095854.GC2215%40dansat.data-plan.com
Some sort stuff
Perl had an optimization for reverse sort, i.e. this kind of block:
@x = sort { $b cmp $a } @y;
John P. Linderman noticed that this optimization breaks sort stability.
Nicholas removed it.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200407091710.NAA48941%40raptor.research.att.com
Meanwhile, Michael Schwern noted that sort subroutines are not
autoloaded (bug #30661).
Selected bugs and fixes
Dave Rolsky found a bug with NEXT and eval(), and (impressively) fixed
it.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=Pine.LNX.4.58.0407091703010.4578%40urth.org
Steve Hay worked with Ken Williams at improving Cwd's Windows support
(bug #30132).
Wolfgang Laun provided a fix for the splice() bug reported last week
(bug #30568).
Jeff Pinyan remarks that $1 et alii are not properly set in "(?{...})"
blocks in regular expressions during backtracking. (Bug #30608.) He
tried to debug it, without success so far.
Tassilo von Parseval asks whether it would be a good idea to backport a
dummy version of the "bytes" pragma to CPAN, so it can be used in
pre-5.6 perls. Robert Spiers remarks that using the "if" pragma is a
better alternative.
Peter J. Acklam reported a bug (#30609) on Math::BigFloat, regarding the
assignment operators ("+=" etc.) Tels investigated.
Andy Lester proposed to remove references to the idiom
sub new {
my $proto = shift;
my $class = ref($proto) || $proto;
...
}
from the perl docs, as it is unnecessary in most cases (bug #30663).
Help needed
Nicholas rewrote the perltodo manpage, with lots of things that would be
cool to have. In addition to fixing bugs, you know.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040711194958.GI784%40plum.flirble.org
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] Comments and
corrections welcome.
