This Week on perl5-porters (Oct 11-17 2004)
"This Week on perl5-porters" was started by Mark-Jason Dominus five
years ago on October 17, exactly five years after the release of perl
5.000.
Debugger handles threads
Richard Foley and Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes added support for debugging
programs using "ithreads". This added the "e" and "E" commands for
displaying the current thread ID and list of thread IDs, respectively,
when -dt is specified on the command-line or $ENV{PERL5DB_THREADED} is
set.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00187.html
Handling failure in source code filters
Steve Hay wondered what Perl source code filters should do on failure.
Perl isn't aware that there was a failure, so it's necessary to "croak"
from the filter. A "Perl_filter_read" comment suggests that it should
return a negative number on failure, whereas "S_filter_gets" just
returns null, so it's not clear which should be correct.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00202.html
%INC caching failure-case problem
Nicholas Clark found a problem (#31924) in bleadperl:
$ echo die >fail.pm
$ ./perl -Ilib -e 'eval "use fail q{:std};"; $INC{"fail.pm"} = "fail.pm"'
Modification of non-creatable hash value attempted, subscript "fail.pm"
at -e line 1.
Rick Delaney said this is because of compile failures being cached
wrongly, and he submitted a patch to make "keys %INC" only return names
of files successfully loaded. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes objected to having
hidden entries in %INC.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00142.html
Exporting constants
David Radunz offered a patch to Exporter so that it would declare
constants. Michael Schwern fears that this will make Exporter much
slower and that it might not be that useful anyway because not all
constants are declared with "constant.pm".
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00064.html
Pod::Man =head1 capitalization
David Wheeler proposed having Pod::Man force uppercasing of "=head1"
headings. Russ Allbery resisted this, because Pod::Man doesn't
necessarily only generate regular man pages, though he'd be open to an
option.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00230.html
ETA for 5.8.6
Nicholas Clark mentioned that he plans to go to a four month release
schedule (previously it was three months), which means a code freeze on
Halloween for 5.8.6.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00248.html
In brief
Craig Berry fixed a Devel::PPPort test on VMS.
Moshe Kaminsky fixed "warnings::warn($obj, $msg)" where $obj has
overloaded stringification.
Tels made "warnings.pm" not load "Carp.pm" unnecessarily, saving a bit
of memory.
Reference
The thread for bug number $BUGNUM can be found at
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=$BUGNUM
About this summary
This summary was written by Scott Lanning. Summaries are published
weekly at http://use.perl.org/ and posted to a mailing list whose
subscription address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] The archive is
at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/. Comments and corrections
welcome.
