This Week on perl5-porters - 7-13 November 2005
This week was really, like David Landgren uses to say, a business
week. Many short threads, many bug fixes, not all particularly
earth-shattering, but Perl is even more solid.
Feedback from Last Week's Summary
About the sort/multicall patch, Robin Houston hushed to say that the
ability to empty the array while you sort it and still retrieve the
results has never worked. The point was that Robin added a test for
this feature, which slipped into the patch sent to the list.
http://xrl.us/ifnf
Steven Schubiger may stop assuming his patch on POD estetics was
overlooked: Rafael applied it seamlessly.
http://xrl.us/ifng
See perl "say()" (continued)
Robin Houston argued about a possible implementation of "pp_say", in a
followup to last week's discussion. Rafael Garcia-Suarez made a few
points and admitted himself not enthusiastic about adding a new
keyword to perl, mainly a weak keyword. And things stand still in this
matter.
http://xrl.us/ifnh
"print FILEHANDLE"
Steve Peters hitted the undocumented behavior of "print FILEHANDLE"
which DWIM outputting $_ to the specified filehandle. He also noticed
some inconsistencies like "print {STDERR}" being a syntax error and
"B::Deparse" being unprepared for this kind of expressions. Rafael
Garcia-Suarez said it doesn't look easy to fix without weird
side-effects.
http://xrl.us/ifni
"&=" and "m//" Misbehavior
Anno Siegel reported the bug #37616 in the last week, about a
malfunction of "&=" operator on strings combined with some pattern
match (mentioned in the previous summary). There ensued some
discussion where Abigail brought the confirmation that "&=" is working
as documented in perlop.pod, section "Bitwise String Operators". In
turn, Sadahiro Tomoyuki showed how the issues with simple regexes
exposed some trouble with handling NUL-terminated strings which
sometimes are visible at the Perl level and sometimes are just an
internals thingy. Rafael Garcia-Suarez and Nicholas Clark confessed to
be bothered by such limitations, which Nicholas thought it could be a
nice bug to fix and which may lead us to a nice bug fix real soon.
The discussion of the ticket enters this week
http://xrl.us/ifnj
Bad Locales in Mac OS X
On a followup to ticket #36061, Steve Peters added a change to
README.macosx about yet another broken locale file, namely eu_ES
(Basque-Spain). This shows up as test failures in ../lib/locale.t.
Dominic Dunlop explained these test failures now are being suppressed,
by skipping the offending locales, avoiding worries to perl builds on
Mac OS X. Dominic also proposed a throrough update of README.macosx
which was applied. With the change, Steve Peters also closed ticket
#35895 which concerned this same locale.
http://xrl.us/ifnk
Dying in map, grep, sort
On RT ticket #24354, Chris Heath provided a rather detailed
description of how the test cases below cause attempts to free
unreferenced scalars.
perl -e 'map die,4 for 3'
perl -e 'grep die,4 for 3'
perl -e 'for $a (3) [EMAIL PROTECTED] {die} 4,5}'
The bug had to do with the interaction between how map, grep, sort
automatically localize certain variables and an odd behavior when
unwinding context and save stacks due to an exception. Rafael
Garcia-Suarez applied Chris' patch as change #26027 to bleadperl.
http://xrl.us/ifnm
Behave Yourself, "ucfirst"
Nicholas Clark opened ticket #37628 to tell about his finding
"ucfirst" can malform UTF-8. Nicholas' inspection of the code revealed
some bad assumptions about lengths (in UTF-8) and exposed the
ill-behaved code. He then noticed "lcfirst" had its own bug as well.
And then he patched the issue(s) with change 26034 and closed the
ticket, setting a model for a most productive monologue in RT.
http://xrl.us/ifnn
Perl on Symbian
Jarkko Hietaniemi brought the latest of his work on the Symbian port
of Perl, reaching release 0.4.0 with a lot done on the UI side
(including improved support to S60 and S80 devices and UIQ).
First patch
http://xrl.us/ifno
Second patch
http://xrl.us/ifnp
"List::Util" issues
* "DProf" breaks "shuffle" * Ticket #32383 was opened by Jarkko
Hietaniemi to report problems while using "DProf" together with
"List::Util::shuffle". Even though the error message has been
changing, it was still there. Robin Houston proposed a patch and was
advised by Graham Barr about the use of "Perl_seed" which was not
refactored until 5.8.1. Robin pulled together changes in Graham's svn
repository more PUSH_MULTICALL changes, and after some tweaks, the
patches were applied, hopefully fixing the issue.
Rafael shows the actual message by bleadperl
http://xrl.us/ifnq
* Memory Leaks in "first" * Tassilo von Parseval opened ticket #37643
to say about memory leaks in "List::Util::first". Dave Mitchell
remembered this issue is already fixed in blead by now.
http://xrl.us/ifnr
Code Unification for Cygwin, Win32 and WinCE
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes wondered about the forked code originally from
win32/win32.c duplicated in Cygwin module "Win32CORE" and the status
of "Win32" module, core for Win32 but available for Cygwin only as
part of the "libwin32" distribution. Yitzchak planned to see these
converging to a common code, where synchronicity will not be lost
again. Jan Dubois gave a full account of the differences to be found
between blead and "libwin32" and noticed that the wince branch also
copied some of this Win32 code.
http://xrl.us/ifns
To Jan, the starting point of this unification was the elimination of
USING_WIDE codebranches that have been unused since the introduction
of internal UTF8 support for PVs. And, indeed, Jan assembled a patch
towards this goal of improving maintainability and the sharing with
Cygwin.
http://xrl.us/ifnt
Cygwin Configure
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes and H.Merijn Brand exchanged a rather long
series of messages while tighting up issues with Configure on Cygwin.
In the end, it looks more stable now.
http://xrl.us/ifnu
Perl on WinCE
WinCE port of Perl received a little love this week. Vadim Konovalov
posted a patch to make 5.8.7 compilable for WinCE platform. H.Merijn
Brand called for a patch against blead first and Vadim promised to do
just that during this week. Later, he sent in the revised patch and
Steve Hay explained how some issues that apply to build configuration
on Win32 and AIX may be needed as well for WinCE.
http://xrl.us/ifnv
"DB_File" 1.814
Dominic Dunlop observed which an old warning on Darwin from
ext/DB_File/t/db-btree.t could go away for the recent revisions of the
OS and posted a patch to do that. Paul Marquess took the change to the
official DB_File with the release of 1.814 and a corresponding patch
to blead.
Dominic gets rid of old Darwin warning
http://xrl.us/ifnw
Paul Marquess announces DB_File 1.814
http://xrl.us/ifnx
"CPAN" 1.76_65
Andreas Koenig brought CPAN.pm up to version 1.76_65.
http://xrl.us/ifny
"Time::HiRes" 1.82
Jarkko Hietaniemi has had a busy time with many, many releases of
"Time::HiRes", eluding porters, smokes and summarizer. I guess by now
"Time::HiRes" in blead must have reached version 1.82 as the CPAN
release.
Nuking Globals and Stashes
Robin Houston remembered April 2001 when people talked about nice ways
to make perl dump by nuking important globals. For example,
perl -e 'delete $::{"@"}; warn'
perl -e 'delete $::{"_"}; sub{}->()'
Back then, Benjamin Sugars proposed a fix still working against blead
and dying to be applied. Steve Peters had a look, found the related
ticket #5851, made some changes and got us rid of these core dumps.
Benjamin Sugars' long-forgotten patch
http://xrl.us/ifnz
Robin Houston ressurects the issue
http://xrl.us/ifn2
Steve Peters closes RT ticket #5851
http://xrl.us/ifn3
Perl on EBCDIC
* "pack('E', $arg)" on perl-5.8.7 * Rajarshi Das posted a notice on
how "pack('E', $arg)" worked on EBCDIC platforms in perl-5.005_03 and
it is not supported anymore on perl-5.8.7 and called for an
alternative. Dave Mitchell and Sadahiro Tomoyuki observed Radarshi's
perl must be a non-standard modification, since the "E" option is not
present in the official 5.005_03 distribution. Rajarshi explained the
'E' is meant to turn ascii string inputs into EBCDIC results. He also
agreed the extra option was locally introduced and was not available
as part of the general source. Sadahiro suggested two alternative
methods: one using the undocumented "utf8::unicode_to_native()" and
other using "pack('U', $arg)" but warned about issues that may arise
between the new UTF8 behavior and old scripts.
http://xrl.us/ifn4
* "cond_timedwait" Issues * Mohammad Yaseen found some errors while
playing with "cond_timedwait" on EBCDIC platform. Yaseen showed the
issues with an extended test adapted from cond.t and hinted on
possible causes.
http://xrl.us/ifn5
"Storable" Updates
Gisle Aas posted a patch to restore "Storable" compatibility allowing
the newer versions to read files written by Storable-0.1. Then Gisle
sent in another patch with a now documented "read_magic()" function to
decode image headers and also a "file_magic()" function. Steve Peters
applied both patches with these new features that come handy for
dealing with "Storable" on any platform.
Gisle restores Storable compatibility
http://xrl.us/ifn6
Gisle brings read_magic() to the foreground
http://xrl.us/ifn7
Handling Security Advisories
"Jack" opened bug #37662 to ask what address a security advisory
regarding perl could be send to. H.Merijn Brand and Abigail advised to
use the perl5-porters mailing list, discussing here in the open.
Nicholas Clark, Dave Mitchell, and Andreas Koenig appreciated the
point of keeping safe sensitive information from end-users, at least
by the time necessary to fix the problem. Rafael Garcia-Suarez and
Michael Cummings compared this to the infrastructure for handling
security advisories by OS vendors.
http://xrl.us/ifn8
Playing Games with gcc
Brendan O'Dea noticed gcc 4 no longer emits "Reading specs from ..."
but rather "Using built-in specs." and posted an alternate mechanism
to locate the gcc include directory. H.Merijn Brand wondered in which
version of gcc the option "--print-libgcc-file-name" used by Brendan
was introduced, for which Brendan and Abe Timmerman supplied some
answers. Jason Vas Dias pointed he raised bug #37582 about this with a
patch accepted as change #26074.
Steve Peters applies Jason's patch
http://xrl.us/ifn9
Brendan's post
http://xrl.us/ifoa
Perl5 Bug Summary
The open tickets count was at 1528 in Nov 7 14:00 GMT. But this had
been a frantic week at bug's front: in a rough counting, perl5-porters
received around 240 messages, in about 100 threads, and only Steve
Peters closed at least 18 tickets. The next week should inevitably
start with a lower score at the bugs count.
Robert Spier and the Bug summary
http://xrl.us/ifob
Perl RT just now
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
In Brief
* Fixing "gmtime" Docs * In RT ticket #35840, Michael Schwern reported
"gmtime" under 5.8.6, unlike documented, returns 9 rather than 8
values. perlfunc was fixed with change #26024 by Steve Peters.
http://xrl.us/ifoc
* "File::Glob" and Its Origins * On a followup to bug #37597, Steve
Peters observed "there have been some changes between the Perl
"bsd_glob()" and the original OpenBSD glob function where it came
from." He'll look into merging the OpenBSD changes in soon.
http://xrl.us/ifod
* perldiag issues * Steve Peters closed RT tickets #3190 and #7543
about minor perldiag issues.
http://xrl.us/ifoe
http://xrl.us/ifof
* Redefining Sort Subs via "goto" * Steve Peters reported on the
solution of bug #7579, which concerned core dumps when redefining
comparison routines via "goto &NAME". After a recent change to
bleadperl, the behavior we get from now on is saner. And another
ticked closed.
./perl -wle 'sub s1 { goto &s2 } sub s2 { $a cmp $b } print sort
s1 (3, 2, 1)'
Can't goto subroutine from a sort sub (or similar callback) at -e line 1.
http://xrl.us/ifog
*A Surprising Segfault (continued)* In a followup to last week's
thread, Dave Mitchell added that, like Rafael Garcia-Suarez, he
believed the nature of the tests being applied to various "pp_*"
functions may be dubious, which calls for more assertions in code and
better tests.
http://xrl.us/ifoh
* 5.8.7 on AIX failing "make test" * Sujeet Kulkarni asked for help to
resolve problems while running "make test" on AIX. Dominic Dunlop
provided some guesswork and H.Merijn Brand added a few hints regarding
AIX oddities.
http://xrl.us/ifoi
Panic with Multiple Encodings Steve Peters noticed the reported bug
was gone with bleadperl. The above command does not panic anymore.
perl -Ilib -Mencoding=iso-8859-1 -wle'binmode STDOUT,
":encoding(iso-8859-1)" or die "binmode:$!";
print "\xe1", "\n";'
"\x{128a}" does not map to iso-8859-1 at -e line 1.
http://xrl.us/ifoj
* "if.pm" vs Other Long-Forgotten Patches * Rafael applied a patch by
Ilya Zakharevich to give more meaningful error messages from if.pm
when invoked with a condition in list context. Ilya greeted the
change, as he was afraid of that taking the route of tens of other
patches waiting forever.
http://xrl.us/ifok
* Silencing "ExtUtils" Tests * Dominic Dunlop posted a patch to
supress some leaked warnings in "ExtUtils" tests which was applied by
Rafael Garcia-Suarez. It seemed like these tests waited long enough
for Schwern's touch after behavior change of "cmp_ok" in "Test::More".
http://xrl.us/ifom
* 5.6.1 Install/Compile on Solaris 8 * Steve Peters urged for more
information in diagnosing bug #9727. Andy Dougherty explained it had
to with the output by newer gcc's, mentioned a short-term fix and
confirmed perl 5.8.x handles this just fine. To Andy, it is a ticket
to be closed.
http://xrl.us/ifon
* Crashes in Multithreaded Server * Zefram opened ticket #37652 to
tell about crashes in a multithreaded server which may result in
terminating or locking up the application. He posted a test program to
reproduce the issue and stack traces obtained with gdb. Currently
Warnocked.
http://xrl.us/ifoo
* English.pm and $COMPILING * Dan Tierra noticed the English name for
$^C, namely $COMPILING, does not get exported when doing "use English
qw(-no_match_vars);". Steve Peters added the variable to the list of
exports with change #26080.
http://xrl.us/ifop
* "OTHERLDFLAGS" in "ExtUtils::MakeMaker" * Steve Peters replied bug
#37433 which concerns a patch to MakeMaker. Fearful of accidental
breaking "ExtUtils::MakeMaker", he announced the patch was sent off to
rt.cpan.org queue.
http://xrl.us/ifoq
* "PERLIO_DEBUG" Patch * Peter Dintelmann found that setting the
environment variable "PERLIO_DEBUG" as described in perlapio.pod could
result in segfaults and proposed a patch, applied to blead as change
#26075.
http://xrl.us/ifor
* "binmode H, ":pop"" Patch * Peter 'Segfault-Killer' Dintelmann, in
ticket #37557, showed how calling "binmode()" after popping the last
IO layer results in a segfault and proposed a patch, applied as change
26101.
http://xrl.us/ifos
*Andy's Const & Local Mission* Andy Lester went on with his tireless
mission of bringing consting and localizing goodness to Perl source
code.
http://xrl.us/ifot
*mathoms on VMS* John E. Malmberg posted a patch to add a compile rule
which is needed for VMS to compile mathoms.c. He also inquired on a
few things that need to be resolved in order to allow blead to build
on VMS.
http://xrl.us/ifou
*Mathoms with Proper Prototypes* Andy Lester noticed the mathoms
functions weren't using proper prototypes, causing gcc to complain.
Steve Peters applied Andy's fix as change #26099.
http://xrl.us/ifov
[EMAIL PROTECTED] on VMS* Abe Timmerman posted the results of blead
snapshot @26091 on VMS. No feedback yet.
http://xrl.us/ifow
* "abs2rel("/foo/bar", "/foo/bar")" * David Golden recently reported
problems in "Path::Class" which Ken Williams traced to an odd behavior
in "File::Spec": "abs2rel("/foo/bar", "/foo/bar")" returns the empty
string rather than "." or something sensible. Before fixing it, Ken
asked what are the likely issues.
http://xrl.us/ifox
*Extending the stack inside ops* Nicholas Clark found an apparent
problem which could mean that extending the stack while inside ops
would be a bad thing. Dave Mitchell explained the applicable rule,
namely, it's the responsibility of the things doing the call to push a
new stack. So Nicholas made the appropriate change for the case in
question and called for feedback on the way he did it.
http://xrl.us/ifoy
*Localizing Shared Variables* "dean" noticed that localizing variables
bound to shared variables can cause the shared variable to become
undefined and provided tests to make his point. No one answered so
far.
http://xrl.us/ifoz
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
Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a
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