This Week on perl5-porters - 12-18 September 2005
Nicholas Clark announced the plan for perl 5.8.8, so it was only
fitting that someone should post a question asking how to compile
5.004. Elsewhere there continued to be lots of discussion of VMS,
carrying on from last week. All told, a fairly busy week with lots of
single post threads, which made summarising a bit difficult.
5.8.8 is Coming
Nicholas Clark posted a plan for 5.8.8.
The deadline for changes (in blead, to be integrated in maint) is 16th
October 2005. He will be "mostly incommunicado" for the first weeks of
October, but explained that it isn't a problem. Fixes of bugs in
pseudohashes and 5.005 threads go directly to maint and little else
does. Steve Peters suggested that changes to re-entrant functions
could be another exception, but for Nicholas it would have to wait for
someone to figure out how to merge the code.
http://xrl.us/hn2o
The Current TODO
http://mirrors.develooper.com/perl/APC/perl-current/pod/perltodo.pod
New Core Module Releases
Jarkko Hietaniemi, fulfilling the promise of last week's
"Math::Complex atan2 bug" thread, announced a patch with several
pending updates for "Math::Complex" and "Math::Trig".
The result of "atan2(0,0)" is now documented as being dependent on the
underlying library.
Nadeem Douba pointed what he called a small technical bug. He called
for an optional argument, "rho", to the subroutine
"great_circle_destination" and explained the rationale of a solution.
Jarkko countered that he was confused by the proposal, which does not
fit the usual concept of radians. The default coordinate system cannot
be changed without breaking existing code and there is no *correct*
spherical coordinate system. He proposed a special export tag as a
possible way to incorporate Nadeem's suggestion.
John Peacock released version-0.48 to CPAN and a corresponding patch
vs. bleadperl. A pure Perl implementation is coming and John hopes he
soon will be done with this project. But before that, the PAUSE
indexer needs to be fixed and "CPANPLUS", "CPAN", "Module::Build"
patched to use version.pm "fulltime".
Zlib on VMS
The efforts to make "Compress::Zlib" work in blead on VMS continue. A
long thread developed involving John E. Malmberg, Paul Marquess
("Compress::Zlib"), Tom Hughes ("IO::Zlib"), Jarkko Hietaniemi
(external gzip support in "IO::Zlib"). It seems there are a zillion
options to configure VMS Unix emulation and not all of these are
handled gracefully by the Perl source code. Uncertainty concerning the
differences of environment remains.
The thread went on under the subject "Zlib 2.00_03 / Blead 25366 on
VMS + patched vms.c" where John Malmberg and Paul Marquess continued
the detective work. John's last message is investigating a possible
problem with "glob()" on VMS which can be responsible for some of the
test failures. It was found that by just removing leading "./" from
directory variables on a test script made all its tests to pass. Craig
Berry explained how limited is the home-grown glob() on VMS and John
Malmberg notices that, as of OpenVMS 7.3-2, a "glob()" function is
provided in the C library that is better be used on releases that
supported it.
Paul Marquess and John Malmberg went on to discuss issues on the
consistency of VMS conversions and how it could be made better. Peter
Prymer confirmed some VMS oddities on filename handling.
ZLIB 2.0 / Blead 25366 on VMS
http://xrl.us/hn2p
More VMS Issues
John E. Malmberg spotted a bug on the VMS specific "Perl_cando()" and
squashed it with patch @25388. H. Merijn Brand applied it.
The patch
http://xrl.us/hn2q
John also confirmed "ExtUtils::CBuilder" 0.13_01 tests ok.
http://xrl.us/hn2r
He added a few comments on the discussion with Ken Williams about an
enhanced file spec handling for current VMS versions.
The week closed with the posting by John Malmberg of an RFC proposing
some VMS behavior changes. Apparently those changes may improve the
consistency and precision of VMS perl.
http://xrl.us/hn2s
Fiddling with the Bloody Grammar
After the closing act of Michael Schwern, there was some subsequent
traffic. Randal Schwartz discussed using "for example", "such as",
"and so on" to say precisely what we mean. He thought it may be used
as a general guideline for future writings, without crusades to fix it
"in the past".
There was silence for a while. And then David Nicol offered a 92K
patch over 5.9.2 replacing every "e\.?g\.?" and "i\.?e\.?" with *for
example* and *that is*. Adding commas and removing "I<italics>" were
left as an exercise for some willing person. No one volunteered.
Michael closes
http://xrl.us/hn2t
Randal's advice
http://xrl.us/hn2u
Chainsaw patch
http://xrl.us/hn2v
OS X 10.4 Issues
"make test" for maint on OXS 10.4 fails lib/locale.t. Randal says: "At
least it fails on only one thing". Rafael remembers it's a problem
with system locales. Dominic Dunlop notices this problem is recorded
as bug #35895 (and logged as a bug with Apple as well - with no
return). Dominic proposes a patch on Darwin to skip lib/locale.t tests
on locales containing eu_ES as well as Byelorussian and Catalan
locales. It applies to versions between 8.0.0 and 8.2.0, and hopefully
will get fixed on the next Apple release. Patch applied.
http://xrl.us/hn2w
Randal L. Schwartz posted a test failure building Storable on OS X. It
basically said "no weak references here". Steve Peters remembered
seeing something similar before: the default Perl on OS X 10.4 was
built without compiling the XS portion of "Scalar::Utils". A fresh
install of "Scalar::Utils" fixes the problem. Randal checked it and
thought Storable would need "Scalar::Util" as a prereq in order to
have the the issue handled automatically.
Fixing the Storable's test to ignore the "weak isn't supported" error
would be the bug report for p5p. Nicholas Clark said that Randal
should send a bug report to his Perl distributor asking "why isn't it
installing the XS version of a core module?" Randal insisted that
'maintperl' was used. Nicholas and Randal have not reached a consensus
yet.
To be continued, no doubt, next week.
http://xrl.us/hn2x
Configuring ranlib for perl on OSX
Steve Peters revived the interest in a bug (#36448) and patch reported
by Luke Closs back in July. It concerned a change Apple did in how ar
works in Tiger and was a "rather simple change". As a matter of fact,
H. Merijn Brand had it in his queue and had been waiting for someone
with access to a MacOS-like OS. Nicholas checked it and applied it.
http://xrl.us/hn2y
The Return of the Consting
Background: Andy Lester has been spending his copious spare time in
the recent months bringing const (and other goodies) to the perl
sources, the rationale being to piggy-back the analysis that modern
compilers can perform as a way to help squash bugs.
Andy was back with a 13K "patch of accumulated goodness", promptly
applied by H. Merijn. Robin Barker reported still getting warning
messages related to attributes.
http://xrl.us/hn2z
Optional arrow operator on "(LIST)[LIST]->"
The thread named "perlref Documentation About Optional -> Is Too
Vague" has long changed to a proposal on a syntax extension. Prodded
by Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes, Rafael Garcia-Suarez applied a patch that
made the following syntactically correct:
my $x = (foo())[0][1];
just like
my $x = (foo())[0]->[1];
Sometime ago, he had expressed a minor concern on the possibility it
allows to people unaware of the problem write non-backwards-compatible
code with 5.10. Back then, Yitzchak answered that could be a reason
not to include the patch in maint. Rafael thought that was the case,
but Nicholas Clark has the final word.
Yitzchak pings
http://xrl.us/hn22
Rafael answers
http://xrl.us/hn23
Pod Indexing Project Status and Plan
Ivan Tubert-Brohman reported on the current status of the Pod Indexing
Project, with a nice summary and details. He pointed the perl-5.8.8
deadline at Oct 16, 2005 and the opportunity to maximize the number of
indexed files. Volunteers are anxiously waited.
The project page
http://pod-indexing.annocpan.org/wiki/
http://xrl.us/hn24
Instrumenting perl at Runtime
Alexander Kolbasov kicked off a long, fascinating thread discussing
DTrace, a Solaris tool that allows one to dynamically instrument a
running program and gather useful information about its behaviour. The
first difficulty Alexander encountered was matching the underlying C
code to the Perl code being executed.
DTrace is being ported to FreeBSD and already understands Java, PHP
and Ruby.
Rafael pointed to Alan Burlison's work in the same area, and pimped
his own "Runops::Switch" module, that allows you to replace perl's
runloop at (script) compile time. He also answered, or provided
pointers for, a number of questions raised by Alexander.
For it to really work, some adaptations need to be made to the
sources.
http://xrl.us/hn25
Alan Burlison's blog
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/alanbur?entry=dtrace_and_perl
Compiling perl 5.004
Shaun Daredia pleaded for help to get 5.004 running on some Linux-type
platform. The trouble is essentially that 5.004 is old, and the
configuration script gets confused by the results that modern versions
of "gcc" emit in response to its probes. H. Merijn Brand provided a
clue as to how to fix the problem, but with no certainty.
http://xrl.us/hn26
PXPerl New Site
PXPerl is a full-featured Perl, Pugs and Parrot binary distribution
for Windows. Grégoire Péan announced the new address for the project.
The current distribution PXPerl 5.8.7-4 contains Perl 5.8.7, Pugs
6.2.9 and Parrot 0.2.2.
The aim of the project is to provide an always up-to-date build. Vive
Perl! Vive Grégoire! Windows users must be grateful.
The announcement
http://xrl.us/hn27
The website
http://pxperl.com/
Parallel Testing
Nicholas notices how the core regression test is getting more
comprehensive. This is a good thing, except that it takes longer to
run. He asks: would it be feasible to run tests in parallel? Of
course, it involves some issues to solve and he advances some of them.
This topic was entered in "perltodo" which was reordered so as to not
scare people any more with brain-melting things.
Yuval Kogman stated that Pugs (the experimental Perl 6 compiler)
actually supports running tests in parallel.
http://xrl.us/hn28
Lots of warnings building [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Paul Marquess reports lots of warnings while building [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Nicholas Clark answers most of them are the same errors blead showed
up when Andy Lester started adding const to blead. He hopes to see
these warnings going away as he brings in fixing patches. VMS or
Windows can be broken by those last changes, as Nicholas were not able
to try them yet. Andy asks whether he can provide some help on this
effort and Nicholas says Andy's later changes needs to be merged and
then some work will be in order to get maint warning free again.
After carping on glibc headers, Nicholas adds clean system headers to
his growing wish list .
http://xrl.us/hn29
"malloc_size" and "malloc_good_size"
Steve Peters announced the detection of malloc_size/malloc_good_size
added to Configure.
John E. Malmberg produces a patch for VMS in order to deal with the
new configure parameters "malloc_size" and "malloc_good_size". Merijn
applied it and also asked if someone tested for problems with win32.
Steve Peters reported to not have seen any problems.
The patch
http://xrl.us/hn3a
The fix
http://xrl.us/hn3b
UTF8-Related Bug Reports
Christian Jaeger reported that taint mode still breaks UTF-8 handling.
Problems can be seen with code as simple as
use Encode;
open F,"some/file/containing_utf8_text" or die $!;
my $buf;
read F,$buf,10,1000 or die $!;
my $str= Encode::decode_utf8($buf);
Things work fine unless the -T switch is used. Dan "the Encode
Maintainer" Kogai duplicated the behaviour on 5.8.6, isolated it and
wondered if a POD fix is in order or is it an authentic undocumented
bug?
http://xrl.us/hn3c
John Gardiner Myers shows a code snippet in bug #37161 where a thread
writes ISO-88591-1 encoded data when it should output UTF-8 instead.
Code in threads seems not to respect the ":utf8" discipline.
http://xrl.us/hn3d
Jim McKim registrated the bug #37183 about the ability of the tiny
script below to cause perl to segfault. No reply yet.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use encoding 'utf8';
my $x = /¨\.\//;
http://xrl.us/hn3e
Perl 5 Bug Summary
Robert Spier delivered the Perl5 bug summary. 1508 open tickets. 8
more *gasp* than last week.
The summary
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
In Brief
Nicholas Clark followed up on a conversation with Salvador Fandiño
about how assertion support could be improved, including opening new
possibilities for what independent modules can achieve with hooks
affecting code in compile time.
http://xrl.us/hn3f
In bug #37190, Nicholas Clark reports OS X and FreeBSD crashing when
using "-DT" with "use warnings;" He suspects of a real bug somewhere.
Rick Delaney gives some clues on the interpretation of the debugging
log.
John Damm Sørensen reports in #37156 on a problem on compiling 5.8.7
on IA64. It concerns a well known issue for which some workarounds are
listed and have been found to work fine. Nevertheless, these are not
mentioned in perl README files.
http://xrl.us/hn3g
Rahul Sharma reported (in bug #37162) a problem during 'make test' on
HP-UX using cc to compile Perl. It had to do with missing gmake. But
gmake should not have being used. Merijn, Nicholas, and Andy Dougherty
discussed how it could have happened, it it were a bug and how to fix
it.
http://xrl.us/hn3h
Hiroshi Manabe reported bug #37144, showing sample code which causes
very unpredictable results when running under the debugger.
for ($i = 0; $i < 10; ++$i) {
$temp = "\x{100}X";
$temp =~ s/[^X]+//; # bad things happen here (under the debugger)
}
No-one offered any insights as to what was happening. Things like this
make you wonder how nobody encountered it before.
http://xrl.us/hn3i
During work on a Pod processor, Joshua Hobblit found quirks in the POD
specs, "Pod::Perldoc" and "Pod::Parser". Should the chunk
bar
baz
parse as an ordinary paragraph or two separate ones (with " baz" in a
verbatim paragraph)? Rafael points Sean Burke as the one to clarify
matters.
http://xrl.us/hn3j
Aaron Kaplan reported in #37142 that "h2xs" produces no code for an
enum constant with explicit negative value like "enum foo { bar = -1
}". He supplied a patch and it was applied.
http://xrl.us/hn3k
"Dentom_Sam" states in bug #37191 that he can consistently get the
error:
Can't call method "close" on an undefined value
on "IPC::Open3". He diagnosed it has to do with redirections leading
to failure and suggested a possible fix.
David Austin complains about "IO::Select" not having a way to
distinguish between timeout and errors. He suggests how a timeout must
be returned and mentions how it is not documented what
"IO::Select->select" returns after a timeout.
http://xrl.us/hn3m
Jos Boumans waved goodbye to the last smoke report from a BSDI box,
the last one of that particular server farm. Yitzchak regrets they had
never got a chance to track an op/int.t failure.
http://xrl.us/hn3n
About this summary
This summary was written by Adriano Ferreira with some additions by
David Landgren.
Information concerning bugs referenced in this summary (as #nnnnn) may
be viewed at http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=nnnnn
Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a
mailing list, (subscription: [EMAIL PROTECTED]). The
archive is at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/. Corrections
and comments are welcome.
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