These Weeks on perl5-porters (9-29 August 2004)
This is an olympic summary: it jumps over three full weeks!
Tainting PATH on Windows
Discussing about a new test failing in the smoke tests for Windows,
Steve Hay found that the following one-liner:
perl -T -e "qx(unqualified)"
doesn't produce the familiar error "Insecure $ENV{PATH} while running
with -T switch"; and all perls since 5.6.0 behave similarly on Windows.
This is probably a bug, although an old one (and the failing test was
marked TODO).
Delenda est the module list
What should be done with the CPAN module list? This discussion is
perhaps a bit off-topic for p5p, but anyway; Andy Lester began to
suggest that the document known as the Long Module List
(http://www.cpan.org/modules/00modlist.long.html) is obsolescent and
should be suppressed, and explained why. Various opinions where then
expressed, more or less vocally. Graham Barr (who wrote and runs
http://search.cpan.org/), at least, has no objection.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-08/msg00434.html
Optrees
James Mastros plays with the idea of optimising accesses to the @_
array, maybe by introducing a new opcode for it. Commenters make good
points and raise difficulties.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040809110050.29817.qmail%40onion.perl.org
Meanwhile, Jim Cromie is digging optrees. For example, he suggested to
remove some of the null ops that serve no purpose in optimized optrees;
but this doesn't raise performance significatively.
The speed of BigInt
Tels, who maintains Math::BigInt, says that it's too slow, because it's
implemented in pure perl. He proposes several solutions: either add a
replacement library to the core, or add an optional XS part to
Math::BigInt. Of course, benchmarks are needed.
perlbug
It was proposed to make perlbug capable of sending mail directly
(mostly for Windows users), maybe by opening a direct connection to some
known SMTP server, of by using LWP to post something on perl's bug
tracking system http://rt.perl.org/. Robert Spier, grand sysadmin,
disliked both ideas, so they're not going to be implemented. As he says,
sending the perlbug-generated report by email directly to the perlbug
adress at perl dot org works very well.
Ternary conditional and tainting
Andy Lester added various regression tests to the core test suite for
features that were neither documented nor tested. Notably, he remarked
that the expression
$x = $tainted_data ? "Foo" : "Bar";
never results in $x being tainted. The general opinion being that this
is the right behaviour, Andy wrote a test and doc patch for it.
fields
Yuval Kogman noted that the "fields" and "base" pragma don't allow
multiple inheritence of fields. Discussion follows; Yuval sent a patch
to fix this situation (against the CPAN version of "base"). Nicholas
Clark pointed out that the divergence of the core and CPAN versions of
"base" really ought to be fixed some day.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-08/msg00462.html
Meanwhile, Rick Delaney sent a patch to optimize the "fields" pragma in
bleadperl (the no-pseudo-hash implementation of it.)
exec and die warnings
Stas Bekman notes that:
exec "echo OK"; die "shouldn't be reached";
doesn't produce a warning "Statement unlikely to be reached", since
die() is allowed in this position. However, if die() is overriden, the
warning is still produced. This effect is a bit annoying.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-08/msg00629.html
In Brief
Alan Burlison discovered a small scoping issue with "my" used in a
"while" condition, where the "while" loop has a "redo". Dave Mitchell
says it's a known issue, and that it's on his long to-do list.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4117A6A1.3060106%40sun.com
Dave Mitchell seems to have understood, for a limited period of time,
perl's internal exception handling mechanism (and used this knowledge to
produce a patch.) See for yourself:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040809202354.GD1955%40iabyn.com
Dave also fixed a case of segmentation fault with UNIVERSAL::AUTOLOAD()
(yes, it's evil), regular expressions and threads.
Hugo found a case of deep recursion involving the "goto &function"
construct. This was fixed by Dave (again).
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes wants a method to tell whether fork() is
supported (by the system or via perl's emulation).
Todd C. Miller says that perl should be built on OpenBSD for the ppc and
arm architectures with the gcc flag -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks,
when using gcc 3. If not, perl segfaults randomly (and for a reason that
hasn't been tracked down).
Dan Jacobson complains that perl has no no-op. It turns out that it
does: 0 and 1, used in void contect, don't generate warnings as other
numerical constants do. Long thread ensues.
Eventually this long thread leads to other subjects: should the ".." and
"..." be overloadable, and how to achieve this?
Pavel Fedin is porting perl 5.6.1 to MorphOS.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-08/msg00506.html
Selected doc patches
Kirrily "Skud" Robert sent a patch to update the perlnewmod manpage to
the current CPAN module authoring best practices.
Jos Boumans proposed a patch to document some of the global
configuration variables of "Carp".
Steve Hay updated the README.win32 document with information about
building perl with the MS VC++ Toolkit 2003.
Patches that are in the queue
Welcome to the new section of the P5P summary, where the summarizer
tells everything about the patches he lets shamefully sleep in his
mailbox because he says he's running out of tuits.
Jarkko Hietaniemi sent a patch that "fixes two problems in the encoding
pragma and the open pragma", notably with the "open ':locale'"
subpragma.
Releases
Tels pre-released Math::BigInt 1.72.
Marcus Holland-Moritz released new alphas of Devel::PPPort, culminating
in version 3.00, with "90 new API functions and macros supported".
About this summary
This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Summaries are
published at irregular intervals on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a
mailing list, which subscription address is
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Comments and corrections welcome. Oh,
and google groups are breaking, apparently.
