These Weeks on perl5-porters (12-25 July 2004)
This week's summary actually covers two weeks. Anyway, with OSCON,
vacations and all that stuff, those are quiet weeks. Read on.
5.8.5 is out
Perl 5.8.5 was released. The P5P announcement can be found at:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040719222147.GG784%40plum.flirble.org
Readonlyness
The thread that spawned from the RC2 release candidate and the problems
solved by it then discussed the problem of the meaning of readonlyness
of SVs. Does it mean that the internal representation of the SV (notably
regarding UTF-8) should be read-only too? No precise consensus was
reached, although Hugo suggested that a readonly PV can be upgraded to
UTF-8, but not downgraded.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040720102342.GL784%40plum.flirble.org
Flexible exceptions
Nicholas Clark wonders what represents the C compilation symbol
PERL_FLEXIBLE_EXCEPTIONS. Nick Ing-Simmons says that it's an old,
unmaintained branch of the code, no longer used. H. Merijn Brand speaks
about chainsaws.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040713143217.GB1424%40plum.flirble.org
Snatching SVs
Stas Bekman asks a question: how (from XS code) can he store an SV away
and reuse it later, making sure that perl won't touch it and try to
reuse it again. Dave Mitchell explains the difference between mortals
and PADTMPs, and how Stas can achieve his goal.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=41016DE5.40206%40stason.org
Thread bugs
Nigel Sandever remarks that sharing an array or a hash (in the ithread
sense of the word) empties it. Elizabeth Mattijsen explains that it's a
side-effect of using ties to share things, and Nick Ing-Simmons adds
that it's expected behaviour (by design.) (bug #30702.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.11-30702-92297.10.3407352468845%40perl.org
Nigel also reported (bug #30674) that perl segfaults when lots of
threads are created. This is due to the lack of check for the return
value of the internal CreateThread() function. He suggests that perl
should die or panic in this case. Discussion goes on on memory
allocators. Meanwhile, Nicholas patches.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.11-30674-92219.13.8761503317861%40perl.org
Other bugs
Nicholas found that for 64 bit builds, there is a problem with
overloading "0+". He then patched the bug out.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040714125211.GO784%40plum.flirble.org
Mike Rosulek found that "passing @array[()] as the second arg to a ($;$)
prototyped sub actually passes the first arg twice" (bug #30688). This
was fixed by Rick Delaney.
File::Find is known to be memory intensive when traversing deep
directory trees (bug #30718). Jim Cromie's advice is to use
File::Find::Rule instead.
Ton Hospel reported that deleting a non-existent element of an array
leaks memory. This was fixed by Dave Mitchell, who remarked that this
bug doesn't affect hashes. (Bug #30733.)
James Mastros makes perl dump core by localising $foo and then assigning
to *foo (bug #30778).
Autrijus Tang found (and patched) a bug in Test::Builder (bug #30783).
It comes from the fact that it's not allowed to store an unshared
reference in a shared structure. Thus, overloaded unshared refs are not
allowed as test names.
DH finds that "blib" uses Cwd and File::Spec, and consequently doesn't
work to test Cwd and File::Spec. He proposes a patch, but Rafael has
some concerns with it.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040722043138.40380.qmail%40web60801.mail.yahoo.com
To-do
More to-do items were discussed and added to the perltodo list:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040711194958.GI784%40plum.flirble.org
Among wanted items: a reentrant regexp engine, autoloaded inlineable
constants, better patchlevel information in the -v output, and more
human beings to implement all that stuff.
Other news
Casey West announced the resurrection of the grand Perl Power Tools
project (and its associated mailing list).
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-07/msg00715.html
Tels is in the process of releasing Math::BigInt v1.71, which addresses
bug #30609 (reported last week.)
Michael Schwern released Test::Simple 0.48_02 (alpha version), and
announced that his aegis repository for Test::More is publicly
accessible.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040719062510.GA19661%40windhund.schwern.org
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040719165659.GA23035%40windhund.schwern.org
Brad Elkins send some compilation fixes for AIX 5.1, to have PAR working
correctly on it.
NetWare port
P Aravinda sent a big patch to make perl compile on NetWare (or, more
precisely, to cross-compile a perl for NetWare from Linux). Nicholas
Clark raised some concerns concerning his patch, both on technical and
on licensing points.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-07/msg00570.html
About this summary
This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly (or, sometimes,
fortnightly) summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted
on a mailing list, which subscription address is
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Comments and corrections welcome.
