This Week on perl5-porters - 18-24 September 2006
If we fake times in our fake stat then fake futimes makes sense. But
chown and chmod make little sense to me - only the current process can
access the scalar so current UID is owner (and can't exec it).
We could accept the calls and set errno to nearest code that made
sense, or perhaps just set the mode so that fake stat saw it.
Have we missed any more fd related calls? If there anything else that
we can do to filehandles via perl interface that we missed?
-- Nick Ing-Simmons, discussing how to improve "PerlIO::Scalar",
September 1st, 2006.
Topics of Interest
Shrinking the context struct
Nicholas Clark noticed a sly new technique to fiddle around with
unions of structs used for dealing with contexts, which would result
in some memory savings that had the added bonus of bringing the size
of the structure down to 64 bytes in the ILP32 data model.
(ILP32 means that integers, longs and pointers are all 32-bit data
types).
So Nicholas applied the change, and then stepped gingerly back from
the keyboard to see what the smoke machines would make of it.
http://xrl.us/rx6a
A roadmap for "MakeMaker" developments
Michael G. Schwern posted his thoughts on what needs to be done to get
a new stable version out the door, as well as future directions, which
includes the desire for a major rewrite of the documentation.
The list appeared to be furious agreement.
http://xrl.us/rx6b
"__attribute__format__(__printf__..." in BSD land
Philip M. Gollucci was having great difficulty in figuring out why gcc
on FreeBSD was stumbling over an "__attribute__" attribute to the
"printf" C declaration, and declared it to be a show-stopper for 5.10,
since it breaks mod_perl2.
http://xrl.us/rx6c
He also supplied the current crop of compiler warnings when compiling
"blead".
http://xrl.us/rx6d
Klocwork
Andy Lester wrote up a report on Klocwork, a source code analysis
tool, comparing it to Coverity, another tool that does the same sort
of work. Jonathon Rockway appeared interested in following up on the
issues uncovered.
http://xrl.us/rx6e
sort and 0 returns from comparison routines
Allen Smith posed a most interesting question about sorts, in relation
to genetics, whereby it may be cheap to compare (and thus order) X and
Y, and is comparing Y and Z. But comparing X and Z may be
inconveniently expensive. So he wanted to know if there was a sort
algorithm that allowed one to punt the decision (for instance, by
returning "undef"), and force the algorithm to use different
comparisons to arrive at a sorted order.
John P. Linderman thought that what Allen really needed was not a
relational sort, but a topological sort, and suggested taking a look
at "Sort::Topological".
mu
http://xrl.us/rx6f
C++ status report
Jarkko Hietaniemi posted his latest patchwork to get the perl
distribution comping with C++. The two remaining modules that still
cause problems are "Compress::Zlib" and "Digest::SHA".
Part of the problem with "Compress::Zlib" is that it is possibly even
more widely used than Perl, and its authors are understandably loathe
to give up K&R function signatures. And it seems the only way to have
both K&R and ANSI signatures is to use horrible #if/#else botches.
http://xrl.us/rx6g
Patches of Interest
Teach regex optimiser how to handle (?=) and (?<=) properly.
Yves Orton taught us a little more about how he taught the regexp
optimiser to make use of the information available in zero-width
lookahead (and lookbehind) assertions.
http://xrl.us/rx6h
Patch for win32.c to fix #38723 and #39531
Andrew Savige and Yves continued to beat this patch into shape.
http://xrl.us/rx6i
"Exporter" documentation
Gabor Szabo suggested adding "use strict/use warnings/use base" into
the documentation for "Exporter". It seemed to rub a number of people
the wrong way.
http://xrl.us/rx6j
New and old bugs from RT
XSUB.h version check may fail due to locale (#37714)
John Peacock supplied a patch to fix this problem in "blead", and
promised a new version of "version" soon.
http://xrl.us/rx6k
"-M" isn't forbidden on the "#!" line with "-x" (#38488)
Rafael thought that it would be difficult to resolve this problem in a
sufficiently robust way, mainly because of whitespace issues on the
command line.
http://xrl.us/rx6m
"PL_compiling.cop_warnings" changed structure in 5.8.8? (#40352)
This was a false alarm that Nicholas Clark figured out was because the
code in question was based an incorrect assumption about what pointer
to use.
http://xrl.us/rx6n
getppid.t fails, all others tests pass (#40362)
pjm at sanger reported a problem on a Tru64 platform with a test for
the parent pid not working correctly. No takers for the moment.
millions and millions of pids
http://xrl.us/rx6o
Nested "for" loops: only internal loop is executed (#40365)
Posting a broken program to a bug-tracker...
Priceless
http://xrl.us/rx6p
"File::Find" mishandles non-dangling symlinks (#40369)
Ammon spotted a bug in "File::Find"'s code, that has probably existed
forever, and fixed it. Steve Peters applied the change.
http://xrl.us/rx6p
"h2xs" enum bug in "ExtUtils::Constant::WriteConstants" (#40381)
Aaron Dancygier hit a problem with "enum"s created with "h2xs". Steve
Peters thought that the bug had possibly been fixed since, and asked
for a test case. Aaron supplied a tarball.
Tune in next week
http://xrl.us/rx6q
threads: deadlock occurred on creation of a thread while joining others
(#40382)
Tsutomu Ikegami demonstrated how to produce thread deadlocks
(threadlocks?) more or less on demand, and noted that "blead" was
better but not perfect. Jerry D. Hedden, having spent an inordinate
amount of time on this issue in the recent past wanted to know if the
fault was still observed when using the latest version (v1.42) of the
"threads" module. When he tried, everything went swimmingly.
http://xrl.us/rx6r
Unexpected empty captured match vars after match (#40384)
Alex Davies demonstrated a bug that exposed some borderline behaviour
with failing "s///g" matches and capture variables. Dave Mitchell
noted that the test suite didn't exercise this problem, and wasn't
even sure what the correct behaviour should be anyway.
And if Dave's not sure...
http://xrl.us/rx6s
"perl_destruct()" leaks "PL_main_cv" (#40388) and "perl_destruct()"
leaks "PL_defstash" (#40389)
Gozer demonstrated two ways to produce leaks, but Andy Dougherty was
unable to recreate them with a fresh copy of "blead", and asked Gozer
to check and see whether he still saw the same problems with that.
The dynamic duo
http://xrl.us/rx6t
http://xrl.us/rx6u
%SIG isn't cleared during "perl_shutdown()" (#40390)
Gozer also went on to show that a signal handler may still be
registered during "perl_shutdown" even though the data structures for
them have been freed. If a signal arrives after this has occurred, bad
things happen.
http://xrl.us/rx6v
"PerlIO::encoding" doesn't handle fallback modes correctly? (#40401)
Steve Hay was trying to bend "PerlIO::encoding" to do his bidding, but
was not having much luck.
http://xrl.us/rx6w
Compiling jpl/PerlInterpreter fails (#40403)
Sakina Suliman was having trouble building the JPL interpreter.
I guess that's why we pulled it
http://xrl.us/rx6x
"jpl/Test" failing to run (#40404)
Sakina then managed to get JPL to run anyway, but then ran into grief
a little further on.
The last JPL user on earth
http://xrl.us/rx6y
"undef" and "seek" on filehandles opened to references causes segfaults
(#40407)
"buu" discovered that if you open a filehandle to an in-memory scalar,
and then undef the scalar, perl will segfault. While this is probably
a silly thing to do at the best of times, a segfault is perhaps a tad
severe to indicate that it's wrong.
http://xrl.us/rx6z
Perl5 Bug Summary
One less than last week
http://xrl.us/rx62
Get 'em while they're hot
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
In Brief
The "SIGSEGV", "SIGBUS" and "SIGILL" signals are now delivered
unsafely, paradoxically, for added safety.
http://xrl.us/rx63
David Landgren followed up on a problem posted by Xho
Jingleheimerschmidt, whereby running the same program under taint mode
doubled the amount of memory used. It turned out to be a problem to do
with using the "x" repetition operator on a list, rather than a
scalar. Thus, the fix was easy, but the reason remains unknown.
http://xrl.us/rx64
The Mac OS/X / SpamAssassin problem continued to roll along with
Dominic Dunlop trying to get a handle on the problem. Alas, without
success.
http://xrl.us/rx65
Yuval Kogman got caught out by the interpolation of scalar references
in a string and wondered if it was a bug or a feature. It is, of
course, a feature, and "perlref" was amended to clarify the fact.
http://xrl.us/rx66
Sebastian Steinlechner spotted a problem with the ordering of variable
declarations in "IO::Socket" and got things straightened out.
http://xrl.us/rx67
Filip Filipov wanted to know how to write "Storable" data files in
Java, so that Perl could read them. Yuval Kogman thought that it would
be easier to use YAML or something else. "Storable" is tied too
intimately to Perl's internals to be used easily as an interchange
format.
http://xrl.us/rx68
The way perl allocates more memory than immediately (with an eye to
reducing the amount of subsequent reallocations required) was tweaked
slightly for 5.8.8. It turns out that this caused a problem in
"DBD::ODBC". But knowing the cause of the problem is half way to
figuring out the solution.
http://xrl.us/rx69
The optimisations that Nicholas Clark introduced into inlined constant
subroutines a while back caused new warnings to emerge in
"File::Slurp"'s test suite. But since the code in question is somewhat
questionable, Nicholas felt that it was working as advertised.
Doctor, it hurts when I do this
http://xrl.us/rx7a
Yves Orton and Nicholas Clark continued to kick around the idea of a
pluggable regexp engine. Stay tuned for more information next week.
http://xrl.us/rx7b
Adriano Ferreira added test descriptions to lib/File/Copy.t,
http://xrl.us/rx7c
About this summary
This summary was written by David Landgren. According to my records,
last week's summary rolled the total words written past the 100 000
words threshold.
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--
"It's overkill of course, but you can never have too much overkill."
