This Week on perl5-porters - 26 September-2 October 2005

That was another busy week. Steve Peters has been shaking the bag of
(old and new) Perl RT tickets, raising a lot of activity and enticing
answers for long forgotten issues. A lot of action in disparate
corners which Perl integrates: VMS, Win32, EBCDIC platforms, Symbian,
among others.

Issues on Older Perls

Do you think nobody cares anymore with ancient Perl 5 sources? You're
plain wrong if you answered yes.

*If You Really Want perl5.004* Back in Sep 13, Shaun Daredia started a
thread by asking for help to compile perl5.004_05, which was amended
with some clues this week. Steven Schubiger mentioned there are some
known issues compiling perl5.00x with gcc and upgrading would be the
best to do. Andy Dougherty said it could be done by hand-editing
makefile and maybe x2p/makefile. Marcus Holland-Moritz suggested using
the buildperl.pl script from "Devel::PPPort", which does the
extraordinary work to (batch) build 5.003, 5.004_0[0-5], 5.005_0[0-4]
and 5.x.x.

http://xrl.us/ht7j

*Fixes to perl5.00504 and "DB_File"* In a followup to bug #27188, Steve
Peters pointed two issues in the ticket. First, the suggested patch
which should fix the problem (failing test due to DB_File.pm) had not
been applied to the 5.00504 branch. Second, the perlbug mail addresses
were just wrong, and Steve attached a patch to fix that. The patch
expected to make lib/db-tree.t work on all platforms where "DB_File"
isn't built attracted the attention of Paul Marquess who volunteered
to apply the change to the CPAN and 5.9.3 version of "DB_File".
Warnocked by now.

http://xrl.us/ht7k

New Core Module Releases

Only a new core module release this week, when Sébastien
Aperghis-Tramoni announced the upload of XSLoader 0.04 to CPAN and a
patch for blead.

http://xrl.us/ht7m

Michael Schwern and Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes had some observations,
which pressed for a new release. On Michael's suggestion, the test
scripts were rewritten to use "Test::More", getting rid of a lot of
clunky constructs. Michael also said that "XSLoader" should prefer
"DynaLoader"'s "bootstrap_inherit()" should it exist and Sébastien
agreed and implemented.

As chromatic didn't understand why the idiom

::ok( ref Cwd->can('fastcwd'),'CODE' )

was used, Michael answered it addressed one of the pitfalls of
"Test.pm <http://Test.pm>"'s swiss-army "ok()" which executes code
references. So you
almost never want to pass it a code ref. Just another reason for
"Test::More". (The things you learn in p5p!)

To Yitzchak, "use strict" did not seem a good idea for a module
supposed to be light. Sébastien relieved Yitzchak's concern saying
"XSLoader" is now strict-safe, but "use strict" is not actually used
to avoid the cost of loading it. Yitzchak pointed a forgotten "no
strict 'refs'" that caused strict.pm <http://strict.pm> to be loaded.

After this, Sébastien announced the 0.05 version of "XSLoader" which
was applied to blead.

http://xrl.us/ht7n

Platform-Specific Issues

*No Symlinks to be Found on Win32* Steve Peters seemed to have concluded
the investigation on broken "File::Find::find" on Win32 with "follow
=> 1". Not being able to tell exactly what change caused the problem,
Steve Peters posted a patch which makes Win32 to never follow symbolic
links (which aren't available anyway). All tests pass, which Steve
Peters finds scary. Steve Hay applied the patch and thought it was
weirder before when tests succeeded with a broken "find()".

http://xrl.us/ht7o

*Path Behavior on Win32* Back in Sep 17, Gisle Aas posted a patch to
make "File::Spec::Win32->path" behave more like an internal utility
often used. Steve Hay reported on a failure seen on
lib/ExtUtils/t/MM_Win32.t and proposed a patch to fix it. Gisle,
Michael Schwern and Jan Dubois engaged in a discussion where the main
fact was that Win32 always searches in the current directory first,
before searching in the directories in the command path - an anomaly
in Unix terms. That prompted for a fix to the test and the application
of Gisle's original patch. Microsoft makes a point of honor to keep
buggy third part running on new versions of Windows just like they
were used to do and Perl on Win32 has to live with that.

http://xrl.us/ht7p

*Compiling Perl on HP-UX* Steve Peters prods Rahul Sharma about the
outcome of discussion of bug #37162 about a failure to compile Perl
5.8.6 with cc on HP-UX, with no answer so far.

http://xrl.us/ht7q

*Compiling Perl on AIX* Alan Olsen noticed none of the compile problems
for AIX 5.3 (discussed in previous week between him and Campo
Weijerman) was entered to RT and asked if he should do it. H.Merijn
Brand said he would prefer a patch to docs and a workaround in
hints/aix.sh. Campo Weijerman posted a partial summary of the current
states of affairs, where some unresolved issues remain. Alan and
H.Merijn in a long sequence of messages exchanged hints and findings
while doing experiments with different versions of AIX and different
versions of gcc and vac compilers. That included recommendations to
build one's own gcc, use IBM's ld and whether "-bbigtoc" is needed or
not (whatever it is). Maybe in the next week, we see the outcome of
all this.

http://xrl.us/ht7r

*Symbian Update* Jarkko Hietaniemi posted a tiny patch tweaking symbols
and an "#include" for Symbian, which was applied after a minor fix
Jarkko himself found necessary.

http://xrl.us/ht7s

Perl5 Bug Summary

Robert Spier brought the Perl5 Bug Summary with the count of 1516 open
tickets against 1513 in the last week. Nicholas Clark still kept the
lead. Robert remembered Queen Mary I, More's Utopia and Reinheitsgebot
(which is about beer).

RT in Sep 26 13:00
http://xrl.us/ht7t
Perl RT just now
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html

Perl on VMS

John E. Malmberg continued to champion an effort towards adding
support to the ODS-5 file system for Perl on VMS. To make it work
right, he engaged in discussions with other Perl 5 porters about VMS
specific modules and extensions to general core modules.

*VMS Modules* Peter Prymmer made a few points about adding new modules
like "VMS::Config" or "VMS::FeatureSet" to the VMS Perl distribution
and how it could help John Malmberg's desire to alter perl's tests.
With respect to changes to "vmsish", Peter noticed that scripts with

use vmsish;

may run on Unix as well, what fosters cross platform perl scripting.
Either this would change or John would take the burden of making a
perl extension which runs everywhere. John E. Malmberg proceeded to
explain how he thought the proposed VMS changes could enter
"VMS::Filespec" and a newly created "VMS::Config". Peter told about a
number of issues that may weight the decisions about the actual API,
including how interpretation of some parameters is arbitrary and at
the whim of OS vendors.

http://xrl.us/ht7u

*Adding Methods to Filespec.pm* When trying to add some methods in
Filespec.pm <http://Filespec.pm>, John E. Malmberg realized it was not as
simple as he
thought. Michael Schwern explained Filespec.pm <http://Filespec.pm> uses
"AutoLoader" and
asked if John remembered to whack out the "Autoloader" bits. John went
on to find out more about "AutoLoader".

http://xrl.us/ht7v

*"VMS::Filespec" Update* John E. Malmberg posted a patch for
"VMS::Filespec" adding the methods needed for other core modules to
properly interpret VMS file specifications. He showed a long list of
modules that need to be changed to test for the existence of the new
methods, and called for suggestions about the best way to make it
work.

Michael Schwern expressed concern about John's long list: too much
platform-specific code for a rare case. John explained his rationale
was to demand less or no modification for CPAN modules and Perl
scripts not yet ported to VMS, something made possible with the new
Unix-related modes. He also posted a roadmap for continuing with
changes in tests coherent with the new VMS functionality.

Michael thought some of the mentioned problems were basic
cross-platform compat issues. He would prefer to see code that works
everywhere or things like "if this system has feature X, do Y" but not
platform-tied behavior. He suggested John to code the logic in a CPAN
module and admitted he meant for long to write basic modules to allow
easy answers for the sorts of questions John had.

http://xrl.us/ht7w

*Introducing "File::System::Spec"* After Michael Schwern's suggestion,
John E. Malmberg wrote and showed up a "File::System::Spec" module to
abstract getting filesystem information, working for Unix and VMS.
Yuval Kogman said how important is being able to ask about a specific
file system for OSes, like OSX and VMS, supporting many at the same
time with different properties. Michael asks John for coordinating
with the work already done in the subject, which can be seen in the
link

http://svn.schwern.org/svn/CPAN/File-System-Spec/trunk/lib/File/System/Spec.pm

John made a lot of observations and wondered what timeframe can be
planned to release this improved functionality, as it is blocking the
Perl on VMS support for current features of the ODS-5 file system.

http://xrl.us/ht7x

A Warning, perldiag, "splain"

Mark-Jason Dominus has opened bug #36950 in the last week to say about
a bizarre warning emitted by the following piece of code.

use Data::Dumper;
open my($O), ">", "/tmp/out";
print $O Data::Dumper->Dump([], []);

Bareword found where operator expected at /tmp/bug.pl line 3, near "$O
Data::Dumper"
(Missing operator before Data::Dumper?)

As Rafael could not reproduce it with maint or blead, Mark thought the
warning didn't need to find its way to perldiag. But Ronald J. Kimball
pointed it is already there with a variable first word and Yitzchak
Scott-Thoennes showed how to find the corresponding diagnostics with
the "splain" utility. Abigail found that it probably has been fixed
somewhere between 5.8.0 and 5.8.1.

Abigail's closing message
http://xrl.us/ht7y

"exit()" Status Code Made Right

Ken Hirsch pointed how the perl code assumes "$?>>8" as the status
code from "exit()", which is true on most systems, but not all. This
causes the build of 5.9.3 to fail in at least one platform. Ken asked
if the macro "WEXITSTATUS()" from POSIX module could be the way to go.
Steve Hay pointed the existence of "${^CHILD_ERROR_NATIVE}" in blead
which could be of some use. With Steve's hint, Ken Hirsch made it work
for the MPE/iX system, but a couple of issues persisted. Gisle Aas
explained the need to override the default behavior of the
"STATUS_UNIT_SET()" macro, something which can't be done portably with
POSIX macros.

http://xrl.us/ht7z

The Future of mv-if-diff

In a continuation to the previous week's discussion, Vadim Konovalov
sketched how the build problems could be worked out with helper file
and script. The solution displeased Rafael Garcia-Suarez because of
the extra complexity to maintenance. Vadim mentioned win32/sync_ext.pl
as a precedent to the proposed approach.

Andy Dougherty guessed the dependency tree evolution made the
mv-if-diff optimization no longer useful and voted for letting it go.
Nicholas wondered ways to reconcile the script's role at the present,
but prefers a simple Makefile. Alan Burlison is not sad to see it
going as perl build on Solaris doesn't use it anyway.

Mike Guy pointed the bug in build logic was that making
Config.pm<http://Config.pm>
doesn't require that miniperl is up to date, just that it exists at
all. Nicholas agreed, but has no clue how to specify a portable rule
to do such thing. Mike Guy and Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes had things to
say about the issue.

http://xrl.us/ht72

"require" (takes 1 and 2)

Michael Schwern reported "CORE::GLOBAL::require" and "require 5" being
broken in blead and supplied a test patch. Rafael Garcia-Suarez filled
in the issue by patching the "require" patch recently applied.

http://xrl.us/ht73

In bug #37274, Michael Schwern reported on how strange was the
behavior of "CORE::require" and "CORE::GLOBAL::require" and how perl
could be sent to deep recursion with his findings. Rafael noticed how
overriding "require()" is special to guarantee

require Foo::Bar;

pass Foo/Bar.pm as an argument and pointed that the problem was
already fixed by patch 25599. He also added that sometimes contortions
to the code, like a new token and a couple of new rules, can be added
to avoid impacting performance with an added new flag and test for
each time a new unary op is built. Schwern conceded and wondered about
"CORE::do" and "CORE::glob" which, during his investigations, have
been found to display potentially similar bugs. Rafael fixed "do()"
single-handedly and stood staring at the big scary case of "glob()".

http://xrl.us/ht74

Reason #19389 to Use Explicit Returns

Ron Savage, in bug #37289, reported on a script which made Perl
erratic on returning hash refs. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes called for
more details, guessing it could be due to perl choosing to interpret
the ambiguous "{ }" as a block or as an anonymous hash constructor.
And that's exactly what's happening, said Michael Schwern, which
called it Reason #19389 to use explicit return statements. Ron tried
with "+" and "return" to disambiguate the syntactic constructions and
everything worked. He asked if it would be possible to output a
warning in such cases. Steven Schubiger replied by telling such
warnings would be superfluous and undesirable against programmers'
habits and the body of code out there. Maybe the functionality could
be added in a pragma similar to "use strict 'return'", but disabled by
default.

http://xrl.us/ht75

Untested Builtins

Continuing on a discussion on writing tests for builtins (dated back
to Aug 8), Steven Schubiger wondered how tests for "getprotoent()"
could be written and expected to be consistent on all systems. Then he
announced to have started to work out basic tests of
"getprotobynumber()". He called for ideas and critiques, warning that
the tests should throw plenty of errors on non-native Unix systems.
Steve Hay confirmed Steven's suspicions with the output of a Windows
XP box and protocols file of this system. Steven adjusted the tests,
hoping to see it tested on other platforms. Steve Hay said the last
patch worked on XP, but he's not sure about other Windows flavors. He
was going to give a try with NT4, 2000 and a ferret. Steven Schubiger
propose that getprotobynumber.t gets integrated to bleadperl so that
subsequent smokes will reveal which further adjustments are in order.

http://xrl.us/ht76

"Compress::Zlib" and "vsnprintf"

During his work to port 5.9.3 to MPE/iX (HP3000) operating system, Ken
Hirsch found out that some zlib defines caused trouble when building
the perl source automatically and called for help. H.Merijn Brand
pointed hint files could be used and were the right thing to do. Some
modules have their own hints folder and one could be created for
"Compress::Zlib". As the problem was related to "vsnprintf"
availability, Nicholas Clark thought it could be handy to add a probe
for "vsnprintf" on the top level perl Configure, which in turn could
drive that choice.

Paul Marquess ("Compress::Zlib" author) has agreed on the two
solutions and said it would be prepared to make it work. He adds that
"Compress::Zlib" only uses a subset of the zlib sources and the beta
of version 2 on CPAN uses even less. The most significant difference
is that building gzio.c is unnecessary, and that's where lives all of
zlib file IO (including the uses of "vsnprintf"). Ken Hirsch posted a
hint file that worked for him.

http://xrl.us/ht77

The Big Thread "use Foo 1"

This was the winner thread of this week, counting 61 messages or so.
In bug #37292, Yves Orton disliked the discrepancy on how a module
which uses "Exporter" and one that does not react to module version
checks. In the command line

perl -MTestVersion=100 -e1

does version checking (and probably throws an error) for
Exporter-based modules while this doesn't happen with
non-Exporter-based modules. Rafael answered this issue is documented
in "perlrun" and

perl -MTestVersion\ 100 -e1

is more like what Yves wanted. Yves' one-liner compiles to "use
TestVersion split(/,/,'100',0)". And that calls attention for the
subtle distinction of the statements below.

use Foo 1; # does version checking
use Foo "1"; # calls import("1")

If the later inherits from "Exporter", version checking is done in
"Exporter::import()", which accounts for the difference of behavior
that triggered the discussion. Many others entered the discussion,
including Graham Barr teaching us a bit of Perl history. The version
checking capability (added by him) was meant to remedy the fact that
modules that did not inherit from Exporter could not be checked. "I am
not saying this is the right way, but this is how it came about." In
short, the documentation in "perldoc -f use" has the final saying and
this won't change without causing incompatibility issues.

A lot of lateral discussions spawned from the thread. For example, I
have been taught about perl on Windows by Ivan Tubert-Brohman, Rafael
(and "perlrun"), Abigail and Yves Orton. The summary is

perl "-MFoo 1" -e 1 (ok, Ivan)
perl "-MFoo\ 1" -e 1 (doh, I tried this as if Windows knew about escapes)
perl -M"Foo 1" -e 1 (ok, Rafael and adapted perlrun)
perl -M'Foo 1' -e 1 (nope, it doesn't like single quotes)

Another subthread grew from Graham Barr mentioning "perl -MFoo\ 100"
used for perl saying which version of a module you have installed.
E.Merijn Brand thought the unpublished Abe's "V" module did a better
job. Randy W. Sims voted for "Module::Info" for the task. Yitzchak and
John Peacock argued about the pros and cons of

perl -MModule -le 'print Module::->VERSION'`
perl -MModule -le 'print $Module::VERSION'`

Yves triggers the thread
http://xrl.us/ht78

Perl on EBCDIC Platforms

*tr// and Character Ranges* Sastry and Sadahiro Tomoyuki kept alive the
thread on issues with "tr//" on EBCDIC platforms, by exchanging and
analyzing test outputs. To let go the failures, Sadahiro advises
skipping the failing tests could be the "best" fix if one remembers
perlod.pod clearly mentions that character ranges are unportable
except for a few special cases.

http://xrl.us/ht79

*Fixing Unicode in EBCDIC* Sadahiro Tomoyuki detected some problems in
utf.c with handling Unicode on EBCDIC platforms and posted patches to
fix it. Jarkko Hietaniemi thanked Sadahiro for the excellent work and
prompted him for preparing a final set of patches to enter 5.9.x and
then 5.8.x. Sadahiro provided some answers and soon we hope to have
Perl Unicode working just fine on EBCDIC.

http://xrl.us/ht8a

Shifting Bitvecs

A long time ago, in bug #969, Steve Peters wondered why

vec($b, 2, 8) >>= 2

would not work as expected for bit vectors. Jarkko Hietaniemi joined
in to say it's a murky corner of Perl semantics, having to do with the
all-things-scalar (string | number | bitvec | etc.) semantics. The
shift operator treats scalars as numbers, and that's the default way
of doing these things. Steve Peters returned this week to figure out
what should results look like if shifting bitvecs worked allright.
Jarkko replied and glanced at a hypothetical new pragma "bitvec" under
which bitvec operations just work as they should. Yitzchak
Scott-Thoennes elaborated further with a bunch of generalizations and
extensions.

http://xrl.us/ht8b

Meanwhile in *maint*

There is much happening with *maint*, which is being prepared for the
5.8.8 release candidate in this October. Nicholas Clark, the pumpkin,
declared open the season on warning fixing patches. But do not mess
with embed.fnc, as he advised: "Don't change the prototype of any
non-static function in [there]."

http://xrl.us/ht8c

The two following threads directly concern *maint*.

*"NN/NULLOK" in embed.fnc* Andy Lester proclaimed to send the last of
his patches to embed.fnc. Now every pointer argument must be specified
either as "NN" if it can't be null or "NULLOK". Newer GCCs will catch
it. Answering Nicholas Clark about his next moves, Andy said he will
have much to do now he's in charge of PR for the Perl Foundation and
there is also MANY warnings on core macros he wants to look at.

http://xrl.us/ht8d

*Where Devel Goes* Last week, Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes was bitten by
installing a snapshot release of maint over a 5.8.7 installation,
which triggered a discussion on when/how to make the version bump to
prevent such things.

Nicholas Clark wondered if a different solution could work out: to
change where the libraries are installed/loaded from. His first
proposal was to install 5.8.7+maint to 5.8.8, to prevent something to
be overwritten. The solution made Andrew Dougherty uneasy with the
possibility of a forgotten broken 5.8.7 snapshot lurking around as
5.8.8. Andrew suggested something like 5.8.7-MAINT23456, which was
immediately followed by Stas Bekman which hinted it could be called
5.8.8-dev just like it is done with Apache. Yitzchak said it could be
done by just setting the version variable to this, with the
possibility to override the behavior via Configure -Dversion=. Stas
said it was ok too and this is waiting for some decision.

http://xrl.us/ht8e

EuroOSCON

Nathan Torkington wrote to say he had some passes for EuroOSCON and
was determined to hand them to whoever people on list decide.
EuroOSCON is the first European O'Reilly conference with no p5p party
planned, but with a promising Maker Faire (open to all). Some people
nominated his favourites. Some favourites declined for the most
various reasons. I bet Nathan thought it would be easier.

http://xrl.us/ht8f

Can't locate when too many open files

Steve Peters proposed a real fix, instead of a workaround, to the
problem of perl reporting "Can't locate ... in @INC" when the maximum
number of open filehandles is reached. He asked for feedback on the
patch and Nicholas Clark came to say it would better to produce a
message like

Can't locate Carp.pm <http://Carp.pm> - Too many open files.

After a few days, Steve committed to blead a patch to do just this.

http://xrl.us/ht8g

Wrong Line Numbers in Warnings

In bug #37302, "ludeman" reopened the can of worms related to warnings
reporting the wrong line number. Yitzchak and Paul Johnson explained
how it has to do with the compiled form of the code, that does not
store this information, using the nearest one which does. Rafael
Garcia-Suarez reported it can't be done without adding such data to
"OP_SCOPE" and making the core deal with it everywhere, which is
likely to cause performance decreases. Steven Schubiger and David
Landgren wondered how the warning message could be improved, but Dave
Mitchell said that, without some special-case code, the best that can
be done is to report a description of the operator currently being
executed.

http://xrl.us/ht8h

Case-Folding on Turkish Characters

Someone (via RT's guest account) asked about updates on the issue of
ticket #36953: a problem on converting between lower and uppercase on
Turkish characters. Dominic Dunlop pointed how the desired conversion
was problematic and mentioned some references. The behavior is
probably due to Perl relying on the locale of the system which does
not do the full case-folding as the ticket requestor wants to. Some
ways to remedy this: (1) Find a locale which does what you want, (2)
Let Perl do full case folding and fix up special cases with regex
substitutions.

http://xrl.us/ht8i

Deprecated "my $v if 0"

Oh my! Dean Herington opens yet another RT ticket, #37315, on "my $v
if 0". Charles E. DeRykus pointed that the use of this idiom had been
deprecated and posted the link to the thread of two weeks before.
Steven Schubiger pointed to a five-years-old summary of the "feature"
by Mark-Jason Dominus and the corresponding thread on p5p.

Two weeks ago
http://xrl.us/ht8k
MJD's summary
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/05/p5pdigest/THISWEEK-20000521.html#my_x_if_0%3B_Trick
The according thread on p5p
http://xrl.us/ht8j

Parrot 0.3.0 "Alex" Released!

By the end of the week, Leopold Toetsch, the Parrot pumpkin, announced
the release of Parrot 0.3.0 with lots of changes and news. Parrot is a
virtual machine aimed at running Perl6 and other dynamic languages,
but you already knew that.

http://xrl.us/ht8m

In Brief

*"cmp_ok" Changes Made Visible* Michael Schwern has welcome some
"uninitialized value" warnings imputable to the new "Test::More"
behavior of "cmp_ok()" to not supress warnings. This was a Good Thing
helping out to spot problems, like these for which Michael provided a
patch.

http://xrl.us/ht8n

*"Cwd::abs_path" Still Fails* RT ticket #32406 tells about a failure on
"Cwd::abs_path" when "." is unreadable for Cwd 3.01. Steve replicated
it with Cwd 3.11.

http://xrl.us/ht8o

*Issues with rt.perl.org* Philip M. Golluci reported not being able to
file new tickets on "rt.perl.org <http://rt.perl.org>". But Steve Peters and
Robert Spier
explained new tickets can't be open via the web interface. They should
be created via the perlbug tool or sending an email detailing the bug
to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

http://xrl.us/ht8p

*Revert Consting for Tk's Sake* Jan Dubois argues that the consting of
"mark" in "dAXMARK" macro (at XSUB.h) should be reverted to prevent
breaking Tk, at least for the maint-5.8 branch .

http://xrl.us/ht8q

*PerlIO Patches* PerlIO got two new test files in a patch by Ilya
Zakharevich. Ilya warned it is very precary due to the absolute lack
of documenting in PerlIO. Vadim Konovalov also contributed a tiny
patch.

Ilya's patch
http://xrl.us/ht8r

*no warnings "bareword"* Rick Delaney pings about a patch to bug
#3269 to prevent "no warnings "bareword"" to turn off too many
warnings.

http://xrl.us/ht8s

*"printf "%d" Doesn't Play Nice* Steve Peters hit the odd behavior of
"printf "%d"" while investigating RT ticket #2580. Yitzchak
Scott-Thoennes explained that "printf" doesn't interface well with
perl's way of using whatever kind of storage fits best.

http://xrl.us/ht8t

*Setting up Nightly Builds* Kean Johnston was interested in setting up
a nightly build of Perl and several CPAN modules. He asked how it
could be done using the non-installed perl installation rather than
the one used in the build system.

That angry sympathetic man, Michael Schwern, gave some instructions on
how he could do it. In short, read teh MakeMaker docs. After a while,
Kean came back after not groking what MakeMaker docs says and
disatisfied about a bad warning of the build process. Yitzchak
Scott-Thoennes suggested the use of the "-Dversiononly" configure
flag. Michael taught to just set "PERL_SRC" to the location of the
Perl source directory and let MakeMaker take care of the rest.

perl Makefile.PL PERL_SRC=/path/to/your/perl/src

http://xrl.us/ht8u

*Magic Open of "ARGV"* Bug #2783 started with the report that the magic
in opening "ARGV" could be dangerous. File names like "| rm -rf *;"
could do evil things. Steve Peters revived the ticket with the hope
that the flaw had been fixed, while Ton Hospel, one of the requestors,
said it was not the case. Adriano Ferreira believed the documentation
in "perldoc -f open" and "perldoc perlopentut" was quite sufficient.
"ARGV" should be preprocessed if one doesn't trust his users and
Ronald Kimball remembers safety with "-e" options could be enforced by
using "--" before user arguments. The ticket and discussion remains
open.

http://xrl.us/ht8v

*Yitzchak's Notes* Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes called for two additions to
the last summaries. With respect to the thread on list slice
subscripting, his intention was to say that people writing
non-backwards-compatible code was no reason at all to keep the feature
out of blead. To be true, he did not think it was not good enough to
keep it out of maint and asks Nicholas Clark "Can this go in?"

http://xrl.us/ht8w

When Yitzchak pinged the list about a patch to silence some warnings
in blead, it was less to apply it and more to get some response from
anybody. This time, Dave Mitchell answered that it seemed correct to
him, with a minor glitch he patched.

http://xrl.us/ht8x

*"chop" and "chomp" Prototypes?* In bug #37276, Michael Schwern asked
where had "chop" and "chomp" prototype gone?

$ perl -wle 'print prototype "CORE::chop"'
Use of uninitialized value in print at -e line 1.

Easy answer by Rafael Garcia-Suarez: in perl58delta we read event
though "chomp()" and "chop()" are overridable, their prototype however
are undefined. "Not a fixable bug, unless we change the way chop() is
parsed, which would lead to backward compatibility nightmares."

http://xrl.us/ht8y

*perl -u is for Dumping* David Boyce reports on bug #37300 that "perl
-Vue1" dumps core. Steve Peters says it really does because "-u" is an
obsolete switch to, well, dump core after compiling.

http://xrl.us/ht8z

*"-DT -e 'use warnings;'" Crashes* Dave Mitchell came back after
studying changes he made which caused "-DT -e 'use warnings;'" to go
bang. He actually solved the issue improving the debugging output.
Hurray for Dave!

http://xrl.us/ht82

About this summary

This summary was written by Adriano Ferreira.

Information concerning bugs referenced in this summary (as #nnnnn) may
be viewed at http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=nnnnn

Information concerning patches to maint or blead referenced in this
summary (as #nnnnn) may be viewed at
http://public.activestate.com/cgi-bin/perlbrowse?patch=nnnnn

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