This Week on perl5-porters (26 July / 1st August 2004)
Due to OSCON and other things, there wasn't much traffic on the perl 5
porters mailing list, but I bet that this wasn't a non-productive week
in the Perl world.
Optree
Jim Cromie was looking at the basic OP structure, and wondered why there
are always two fields "op_sibling" and "op_next" that seem to have the
same purpose. He's willing to try to unify them. Dave Mitchell commented
that the operation might be quite delicate (or in other words that
dragons hide in the optree optimizer.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=41092249.9030903%40divsol.com
>From the C lib
Slaven Rezic proposed to use strlcpy() instead of strncpy() in the perl
core, but that would need at least to add a Configure probe for it. (bug
#30838).
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.11-30838-92699.13.8032172316222%40perl.org
MakeMaker and rpaths
Rafael provided a patch to remove the empty rpaths (runtime paths,
searched to find dynamic shared librairies) that might be put by
MakeMaker into the .so files during the build process. Marcus
Holland-Moritz came up with a small enhancement. Michael Schwern
declined to comment yet.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040728105649.71714da0%40localhost
Perl6-ish BEGIN
Randal L. Schwartz proposed to enhance the syntax of BEGIN blocks so
that it can return a value (at compile-time, being constant-folded).
Rafael comments that it might not be very difficult, but that it looks
like a feature for blead rathen than for maint. Mark Mielke pointed out
a smallish backwards incompatibility with this idea.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=863c3651ch.fsf%40blue.stonehenge.com
Mixed line endings
Richard Jelinek reported that perl can't cope with UTF-8 encoded source
files that mix different types of line endings. (Apparently there is
some evil emacs extension that routinely produces such files.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040729231153.A16115%40petamem.com
In Brief
Tels released Math::BigInt 1.71.
In the process of doing so, he wonders what is the difference between
overload::StrVal() and Scalar::Util::refaddr(). Apparently the later can
be used in place of the former. Fergal Daly and Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes
provide some historical explanations.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200407301527.04010%40bloodgate.com
Marcus is working towards Devel::PPPort 3.00.
David Favor reports that the -w operator is broken for GSA directories
on AIX (bug #30885). Rafael has no idea what GSA directories are.
Dave Mitchell added explicative comments at the top of each core .c
file. Yitzchak thought it was what the Tolkien quotes were for,
actually.
Dan Jacobson thinks that if -i and -w used on the command-line, but if
no files are given, perl could emit a warning (bug #30858).
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.
