This Fortnight on perl5-porters - 13-26 November 2006
[we could] not increment the reference count (and hope the SV is still
around when the lvalue subroutine is called) -- Gerard Goossen
Hope and programming don't mix well usually. -- Rafaël Garcia-Suarez
Topics of Interest
Installing Perl still shouldn't feel like a rite of passage
The thread continued unabated this last fortnight, with a lot of
discussion on how to improve INSTALL. The document attempts to address
a number of conflicting requirements, which means that it won't be
easy to get right.
http://xrl.us/tkb6
Failures while attempting to install Plagger with "blead"
Steve Peters continued to analyse the reasons why Plagger failed to
build on "blead". It turns out that some prerequisites also fail on
5.8.8, so it's not as if it's completely "blead"'s fault.
Stress testing stress
http://xrl.us/tkb7
Change 24714 broke "Term::ReadLine::Gnu" TODO
Andreas König found that "Term::ReadLine::Gnu" was whacked on "blead",
which was due to what Nicholas Clark categorised as an over-ambitious
patch to copy SVs lazily in "sv_setsv()".
http://xrl.us/tar8
The _ prototype does not work correctly on sub x (_) x;
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason was the first person to notice a problem with
the new _ (underscore) prototype (that indicates that the routine
operates on $_ by default).
If one defines a routine, such as:
sub odd (_) {
return $_ % 2
}
... then calling "odd" (as opposed to "odd()") bypasses the
pass-the-$_ mechanism. Rafaël Garcia-Suarez fixed this up straight
away.
still in beta
http://xrl.us/tkb8
Memory leak with "s///" and hashes
Rafaël was puzzled by a leak with substitutions and hashes and
wondered if the problem was something to do with shared keys. Dave
Mitchell realised that the problem was something else entirely, and
reduced Rafaël's original problematic code down to a one-liner.
Dave's code showed that the problem was that as soon as one executed a
regular expression with an alternation (that is, "/a|b/"), a few SVs
were leaked each time. Yves Orton sighed, and admitted that it was
probably all his fault.
Dave pinpointed exactly where in the code they were leaking from. This
was enough to help Yves, and he supplied a fix in short order. Which
worked, and was thus applied.
And they lived happily unallocated ever after
http://xrl.us/tkb9
How do I check a valid mail address?
Aaron Sherman took a look at the stock answer to this question (in
perlfaq8) and dusted it down and made a few improvements. The change
was promptly accepted by Rafaël.
For some strange reason, the thread then devolved into a long
discussion about locales, Unicode and escaping characters that don't
need to be escaped.
http://xrl.us/tkca
Testing bleadperl with "Pod::Coverage"
Steve Peters noticed that "Pod::Coverage" thought that lots of
routines weren't documented in "blead". The routines in question were
all constant routines, and, thanks to Nicholas Clark's efforts to
reduce the amount of memory they use, they are now so small that they
escape "Pod::Coverage"'s attention entirely. Nicholas suggested one
way of fixing this.
'threads' failures
Jerry D. Hedden cooked up a torture test to provoke race conditions
more easily with threads. The results exceeded his wildest dreams (or
nightmares, take your pick).
Dave Mitchell gave Jerry some assistance, and after a while Jerry
found the root of the problem that was responsible for nearly all the
errors. Once this was fixed, only a couple remained, but Jerry had a
feeling he knew why they were occurring.
http://xrl.us/tkcb
"PL_perlio_fd_refcnt" and "PERL_TRACK_MEMPOOL"
Jan Dubois reported that things were still not playing nicely in
PerlIO land when the right combination of configuration parameters was
found. The problem was that the underlying memory allocation routine
was receiving a pointer to a block of memory allocated by a
higher-level allocation wrapper.
The higher level code is needed when threads come into play, where
more detailed knowledge about which thread asked for the allocated
memory becomes more important (especially on Win32). Jarkko Hietaniemi
had an idea of how it could be fixed.
http://xrl.us/tkcc
Jerry hacked around a bit more, and found that a detached thread was
destructing itself after the main script had already ended, but didn't
know how to pin it down in more detail. After stepping through the
code he found a wonderful comment "/* FIXME: treaddead ??? */" in the
routine at the top of the call stack.
Evidently he was onto something, and supplied a patch to fix it up,
which Rafaël dutifully applied.
http://xrl.us/tkcd
Having pondered the metaphysical issues of FIXME comments in code for
a while, Jerry grepped the source to see if there were any others
lying in ambush... and discovered dozens.
He wondered whether it was worth going through the list and adding
items to the TODO list as needed. Warnocked.
http://xrl.us/tkce
Fix linker error on Win32
Recent code changes to "blead" caused linker failures on Win32. Both
he and Yves Orton independently discovered the fix. So Rafaël applied
the change, but Steve continued to note a crash in
ext/XS/APItest/t/svsetsv.t.
Steve finally managed to get things straightened out with some
particularly devious macro trickery.
pay no attention to the man behind the preprocessor
http://xrl.us/tkcf
"bignum" breaks "Getopt::Long"
It's not so much that one breaks the other, it's just that politely
ignoring each other can only get you so far. H.Merijn Brand uncovered
a number of problems when he needed 64 bit integers on a 32-bit CPU,
so he just added "-Mbignum" to the command-line, and was faintly
surprised when things fell apart.
There followed a long thread about implicit assumptions, containers
and content, the uselessness of "ref($foo) eq 'REF'". In the middle,
Yves Orton proposed a patch to fix things up, and a nice overview of
why it's so difficult to write code that asks "can I use this
reference as an array?".
http://xrl.us/tkcg
Tels discovered that "Benchmark" fails under "-Mbignum" and filed bug
#40917. Sadahiro Tomoyuki determined what the problem was and came up
with a fix, which Steve Peters applied.
http://xrl.us/tkch
lvalue "substr" using mortals
Gerard Goossen returned to a problem he raised in August:
http://xrl.us/tkci
with a patch that he proposed to fix the behaviour. Rafaël had quick
look at Gerard's idea, but wondered if it wasn't just sweeping the
underlying problem under the carpet until the end of the scope. Gerard
explained that he saw there were two alternatives available and how to
make them work.
Unfortunately, after a little thought, he realised that the first
alternative couldn't work. Rafaël found another couple of problems
with it as well, and hinted that the second alternative was possibly
too fragile. It remains to be seen whether some sort of weak reference
might do the trick.
http://xrl.us/tkcj
Config on 'other OS's
H.Merijn Brand did some house-keeping on Configure. First he refreshed
the MC units.
http://xrl.us/tkck
and then went through to see which new variables that had been added
to Configure in recent times had no sensible defaults for them. The
platforms included Plan 9, Win32, VMS, Symbian and a few others.
He also wrote some code to ensure that changes in the future will come
up on the radar much more quickly, rather than having to remember to
do run some quickly-forgotten script, A number of porters pitched in
and filled out most of the missing blanks.
http://xrl.us/tkcm
"Class::MethodMaker" breaks somewhere between 5.9.3 and 5.9.4
Steffen Schwigon noticed that this module, a pre-requisite for several
dozen modules on CPAN alone, fails on "blead", from 5.9.4 onwards.
Rafaël traced this to a change that outlawed the lvalue use of
"GvNAME".
Steve Peters fixed things up, and started to work on getting ppport up
to speed on the matter.
http://xrl.us/tkcn
Can gcc's "ar" command use a file to list the objects to add?
Steve Hay was trying to teach "ar" to look at a file and use its
contents as a list of object names to add to a library, all for the
sake of reducing the length of a command line.
Nicholas Clark wondered if "miniperl" was usable at this point, in
which case it could be used to furnish basic "xargs" functionality.
http://xrl.us/tkco
perl5db.pl detecting forked debugger on VMS
John E. Malmberg was back in town, hacking perl on VMS. He was having
trouble with the debugger, and he and Craig A. Berry thrashed out the
issues.
http://xrl.us/tkcp
Later on he committed a patch, which provided some nifty functionality
for running the debugger in a separate terminal windows. Craig A.
Berry thought the patch was promising, although he had a couple of
reservations about the implementation. Nevertheless, he applied the
patch and promised to take the debugger out for a spin.
http://xrl.us/tkcq
28325/6 breaks "DateTime::Format::Strptime"
Andreas Knig isolated the change that caused
"DateTime::Format::Strptime" to start falling over. Yves Orton
realised that this was a symptom of a bug in the regular expression
engine, made the appropriate fix, and added a test to make sure it
stays fixed.
http://xrl.us/tkcr
The patch caused something else to fall over in the test suite. This
turned out to be because Yves forgot to include all the relevant
pieces needed.
http://xrl.us/tkcs
Andeas also caught the problem, leading Nicholas to comment that
t/harness needs to become fussier, since it misses things on Win32
(where Yves develops) that only show up under "TEST" on Unix.
http://xrl.us/tkct
Configure silence for 5005threads
Even though 5.005 threads have been completely excised from the 5.10
codebase, the Configure infrastructure still knows about it, since it
is used to generate the final "Configure" scripts for both "maint" and
"blead". He did manage, however, to make it shut up.
http://xrl.us/tkcu
New development release in sight
Rafaël announced that he wanted to push 5.9.5 out the door, and asked
the porters what they were working on, and what they thought would be
ready soon.
Dave Mitchell admitted that he had broken a few things recently but
was unlikely to find the time in the next few weeks to attempt the
repairs.
Steve Peters wanted to make directory handles more useful, but was
stuck on a problem with pipes hanging on OpenBSD, and was having
trouble ruling Perl out before filing a bug with the OpenBSD kernel
hackers.
H.Merijn Brand mentioned that there were a few "Configure" issues he
wanted to look into, and possibly an edit or two to the README/INSTALL
issues as raised by Michael G. Schwern. H.Merijn's "Configure" issues
reminded Andy Dougherty about a problem with locales, GNU's make and
Solaris, but lacked a Solaris box to check it out.
Yves Orton mapped out his priorities, mainly bug fixes and making
semi-broken things work sanely. One big item was that he wanted to get
the regular expression engine to a state where custom engines could be
dropped in, that would allow, for instance, test coverage analysis of
regular expressions, or otherwise hacking on the engine without being
forced to relink perl.
Steve Hay wants to get Visual C++ support finished, and resolve the
bug that prevents mod_perl 1.x from building successfully. When
Nicholas Clark mentioned the probable cause of the problem, it
reminded Rick Delaney about diddling %INC to force a module to be
reloaded (something that "mod_perl" likes doing a lot). And that was
enough for Nicholas to track down the offending code, and fix it.
Jos I. Boumans provided the list of what modules need to go into core
in order for CPANPLUS to be added in.
Philip M. Gollucci noted that there were still some 5.005 threads
remnants dotted about in the code. Steve Hay thought that it was just
harmless detritus, since the 5.005 threads implementation code had
been removed over four years ago. Steve Hay thought that it should be
cleaned up completely, if only to avoid further confusion in the
future.
Andy Dougherty cautioned that further cleaning would only add to the
difficulty of merging "blead" back into "maint". H.Merijn agreed,
saying that the current state of affairs was pretty much optimal.
http://xrl.us/tkcv
io_sock.t failure with VC8
Steve Hay discovered that this test reads its own source code, and saw
that it managed to read only 4096 bytes of code and thus flunked the
test. Steve thought the number was a little too coincidental to have
been left to chance, and wondered where to start looking.
my lucky number
http://xrl.us/tkcw
Steve Hay fixed up problems in posix.t with "strftime" hanging when
VC8 was used to build Perl. He traced it down to the fact that the C
run-time library didn't recognise %D as a valid format, and things
went downhill from there.
http://xrl.us/tkcx
He also tidied up the warnings about deprecated CRT function names in
VC8, and updated "perltodo", because what he did was at best a
stop-gap measure, and someone needs to come up with something better.
http://xrl.us/tkcy
"qr//" benchmark
Tels ran some benchmarks on compiled regexps and wondered what the
numbers meant. A long discussion followed, developing on the concepts
of implementing a "rule" feature for Perl 5, how compiled regexps
behave, how to deal with combining precompiled regexps and best
practices for building a big precompiled expression from a number of
smaller fragments.
http://xrl.us/tkcz
Patches of Interest
static linkage for perl.exe for win32
A number of porters agreed that this would be useful, and in the end
the necessary changes were committed to Win32's Makefile.
http://xrl.us/tkc2
Regex Utility Functions and Substitution Fix (XML::Twig core dump)
Yves recent work to teach the regular expression optimiser about
lookahead assertions threw some other assumptions about target lengths
off. So he whipped up a patch to straighten things out. Bundled in
with the patch were assorted improvements he'd made to the engine here
and there.
http://xrl.us/tkc3
Assorted goodness added to the regular expression engine
Now that the regular expression has a new recursion syntax (via
"(?1)"), Yves has been exercising them by converting old-style
"(??{...}" recursion patterns over to it, and in doing so discovered a
fundamental limitation, in that some times you want to recurse back to
a capture buffer that's relative to the current location, not the
beginning. So he extended "(?1)" to allow "(?-1)", and made it work,
too.
A new feature in every box
http://xrl.us/tkc4
He also closed out bug #19049 and added relative backreferences, which
means you can say "/foo (\w+) bar (\w+) \R1/" and the reference count
runs backwards from the current point, leftwards, to the nth capture
group.
I for one will find this handy
http://xrl.us/tkc5
He also fixed up "/a++b/" by teaching the optimiser to look for "ab"
before bringing the heavy artillery to bear.
http://xrl.us/tkc6
He also added "regmust()" to re.pm/re.xs, which exposes to the client
code what the optimiser considers to be the floating and anchored
strings of a potential match.
http://xrl.us/tkc7
In other news, Ybes also reorganised the flags of the "regexp" struct
into two fields, one internal, and one external and applied a
consistent naming convention.
Separation of interest
http://xrl.us/tkc8
New and old bugs from RT
search position reset after "local" save/restore (#1716)
Yves Orton went travelling back in time to have a look at some really
olde bugs. This earliest bug was an issue of magic. Yves thought that
there should be some way of getting things to work correctly for "pos"
at least.
This reminded Dave Mitchell that he had been meaning to get around to
looking at how "local" and magic play together (or not), and told Yves
that it was probably on his personal TODO list. Ironically, the sig
attached to the reply was "Never do today what you can put off till
tomorrow."
Magic, murder and the weather
http://xrl.us/tkc9
Undefining signals (#2383)
Rafaël also retired another ancient bug: assigning "undef" to a signal
handler now restores the default handler.
http://xrl.us/tkda
segfault on big regexp (#3689)
Yves found another bug report concerning core dumping badness over a
regular expression that Steve Peters missed a while back when he
closed out several zillion bugs,and noted that it was fixed in
"blead".
http://xrl.us/tkdb
misplaced HERE mark in regexp error (#4360)
Yves explained that attempts to use variable width look-behind
assertions (which aren't currently implemented in Perl, although Yves
will no doubt implement them next week) cause the HERE mark to point
at the wrong place.
This is because by the time the parser has figured out that there is
indeed a variable width look-behind assertion, it no lacks the neurons
to remember *where* it actually occurred. Yves suggested that the best
way forward would be to drop the HERE marker in this context.
He should know
http://xrl.us/tkdc
Regexp replaces using large replacement variables fails (#6006)
Yves classified this bug a more of a parsing issue than a regular
expression issue (the fact that "${10}" doesn't behave as it should
(like $10)). He added a TODO test for someone else to address.
http://xrl.us/tkdd
"\G" with "/h" results in infinite loop in 5.6 and later (#6893)
Yves thought that this bug stank, since it involved people playing
around with things that the regular expression engine would rather
keep to itself. He fixed the problem, but this caused a test in
"Text::Balanced" to fail. But then again, as the man page of that
module says, "There are undoubtedly serious bugs lurking somewhere in
this code".
http://xrl.us/tkde
With another round of patching, he managed to get thing into good
shape.
http://xrl.us/tkdf
bug in "s/\s$word\s/ /gi" and $& (#18209)
Yves could not reproduce this problem, either in "maint" or "blead".
Just to be on the safe side, he wrote a test case to make sure someone
finds out about it if it ever comes back again.
http://xrl.us/tkdg
"(a|b)*" cannot match a string longer than "2**15-1" characters (#18268)
Yves confirmed that this was indeed a hard limit of the regular
expression engine and couldn't see how it could be fixed, so he added
a couple of tests to the test suite, and marked them TODO.
http://xrl.us/tkdh
"/(.*)[bc]/" 10000 times slower in 5.8.0 vs 5.6.1 (#22395)
This was caused by an over-pessimisation in change #14115. Yves
optimised the common case to make it go 10000 time faster again.
http://xrl.us/tkdi
He also made another regular expression go speedy fast again (bug in
regexp "m/(.*?)b/ig") (#25822)
http://xrl.us/tkdj
"Encode::is_utf8" on tainted UTF8 string returns false (#32687)
Rafaël fixed up the tainting logic of "blead"'s copy of "Encode" and
suggested to Dan Kogai that he incorporate the change in his own
version.
Paging Dan "Mr. Encode Maintainer" Kogai, white courtesy phone
http://xrl.us/tkdk
$^R undefined on matches involving backreferences (#36909)
Yves also fixed this bug. H.Merijn yearned to clean up the white space
as well, thought about what Dave Mitchell might say, and decided to do
nothing.
http://xrl.us/tkdm
The above change also fixed a bug your humble summariser uncovered a
couple of years ago. Now it's fixed. Yay Yves! ($^R value lost in
(?:...)? constructs, bug #32840)
http://xrl.us/tkdn
Regexp stack overflow in 5.8.7 (#37230)
Brian Candler posted a bug report in September concerning a regular
expression used to parse a particularly devious line in an Apache log
file. Yves was pretty sure that the problem was resolved in "blead".
http://xrl.us/tkdo
"Cwd::chdir()" and handles (#38466)
Ken Williams was astonished to learn that "chdir" may operate on file
handles. He updated the "PathTools" distribution.
"Holy crap, chdir() can accept a filehandle? I had no idea."
http://xrl.us/tasi
segfault in regex on a very long string (#40654)
Stas Bekman checked in to see what the status is with this bug.
Answer: fixed in "blead", still fails in latest "maint".
http://xrl.us/tkdp
perlop "=>" (#40854)
Dr. Ruud asked a fairly innocent question about bareword hash keys and
the fat comma operator, and this generated a certain amount of
traffic. John Peacock correctly identified the issue as being the fact
that the leading zero of the bareword was triggering octal
interpretation.
http://xrl.us/tkdq
"find2perl -ls" very slow on some LDAP-based "getpwent" systems (#40867)
David Dyck found that "find2perl"'s propensity to warm its caches
caused massive slowdowns on big LDAP directories, and wondered if
there would be any problems in adopting a lazy caching strategy.
Rafaël saw no problem.
do not do today...
http://xrl.us/tkdr
"pod2xxx" requires "Pod::*" parsers to reset state (#40899)
espie uncovered a problem with Pod::Man *et al.* using a single POD
parser object to parse multiple files, which causes problems. Earlier
files with POD errors influence the rendering of subsequent files.
(This issue reared its head a few months back, when Russ Alberry was
working on the podlators distribution).
http://xrl.us/tkds
Record reads and :encoding don't mix (#40901)
Christopher J. Madsen discovered that reading fixed-length records
(for instance, with "$/ = \10") and ":encoding" don't play well
together. Especially when converting between EBCDIC and UTF-8.
why am I not surprised?
http://xrl.us/tkdt
'Aho-Corasick' regex patch (28373) not thread-safe (#40954)
Jerry D. Hedden found, much to Yves's dismay, that the Aho-Corasick
patch was not thread-safe. When Yves looked at what needed to be done
he threw up his hands in horror and wondered if there wasn't a better
way of abstracted the differences between threaded an unthreaded
builds.
The main problem is that the op-tree (which also contains regops) is
shared among all threads, so detached threads tend to have more
problems with heavy objects hanging off the op-tree. Dave Mitchell
said that he had plans for a "copy-on-retrieve" technique for this
problem, which would mean that a lot of these sorts of issues with
threads would suddenly disappear.
http://xrl.us/tkdu
Similarly, Jerry also found that "Perl_op_clear" is not thread-safe
(#40965).
http://xrl.us/tkdv
"Date::Parse" mysteriously lowercasing text when an unrelated variable
is used. (#40957)
Mumia W. encountered a curious bug involving sorts, closures and "lc"
which resulted in some very strange action at a distance.
and there was great puzzlement
http://xrl.us/tkdw
Build fails with "-DNO_MATHOMS" (#40963)
Jerry D. Hedden found that you can't build perl without mathoms,
despite what it says on the tin.
http://xrl.us/tkdx
MSWin32: can't disable crlf trans. on STDxxx using :raw or binmode (#40964)
Vaclav Ovsik built a perl with his bare hands on Win32, and noticed
that he couldn't disable line-endings translations through the PerlIO
layer.
http://xrl.us/tkdy
SIGSEGV with "pos()" in regexp (#40989)
Christian Mittag had the decency to produce one of the tiniest
programs possible to provoke a core dump, with the following code:
$_="a\x{111}\x{111}a\t";
s/\t/pos;' ';/eg;
Unfortunately no-one leapt to his rescue.
won't you come on down to my
http://xrl.us/tkdz
Perl5 Bug Summary
For the first time in a quite some time, a significant reduction in
the number of open bugs was observed. Yay! Congratulations to everyone
who helped out.
5 open, 7 closed
http://xrl.us/tkd2
7 open.... and *18* closed
http://xrl.us/tkd3
We need a "choose random bug" link
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
New Core Modules
* "threads" went to version 1.51 and on to version 1.52.
http://xrl.us/tkd4
http://xrl.us/tkd5
* "Module::Pluggable" was offered to the core.
Jos, unplugged
http://xrl.us/tkd6
* "Module::Load::Conditional" made it to the core. Tels wondered
about core bloat, but I told him that there was nothing to worry
about.
It's all good
http://xrl.us/tkd7
* "IPC::Cmd" also went past Go and collected $200.
http://xrl.us/tkd8
In Brief
The "WHOA THERE" messages were toned down.
http://xrl.us/tkd9
Yves Orton was a busy man this week, in case you hadn't already
realised. Some more of his handiwork included noticing that bug #6719
wasn't. It was
working as documented
http://xrl.us/tkea
Bug #17542 is no longer confuses on "blead",
http://xrl.us/tkeb
$` is now always correct after replacement (bug #19049)
http://xrl.us/tkec
and there are no more spurious undefs in "@-" and "@+" during "(?{})"
and "(??{})" (bug #22614)
http://xrl.us/tked
In other news, Rafaël fixed up a problem with base.pm calling
"->isa()" (bug #24824)
http://xrl.us/tkee
and made tied variables work with .= <> in blead (bug #38631)
http://xrl.us/tkef
On the other hand, he didn't know what to do when $1 is bound to an
out-of-scope variable so he added an assert in the code, to fail
gracefully, (bug #38869)
http://xrl.us/tkeg
although he managed to make "Tie::Memoize::EXISTS" cache its value
(bug #39026),
http://xrl.us/tkeh
as well as ensuring that "rcatline" stringifies references (bug
#39037) (when it has to).
http://xrl.us/tkei
Adriano Ferreira closed out a "Symbol::delete_package()" bug (bug
#34078) (a documentation patch), since the documentation has already
been patched,
http://xrl.us/tkej
and added some tests and documentation for "&=", "|=" and "^=" (bug
#36689)
http://xrl.us/tkek
as well as an improvement to a documentation example for
"File::Basename". (bug #40866)
http://xrl.us/tkem
Nicholas Clark managed to resolve the "blead" crash in
"Perl_pp_entersub()" (bug #40681) to his satisfaction by tweaking the
"sv_setsv_flags" macro's behaviour.
http://xrl.us/tken
Philippe found some inconsistencies in items formatted with "pod2html"
(bug #40851), but no "pod2html" specialists were on hand to offer
advice.
http://xrl.us/tkeo
Philip M. Gollucci thought that "rt.perl.org" needs a 5.9.5 category
for reporting bugs.
http://xrl.us/tkep
Mike Guy, man of infinite memory, recalled that list assignments with
lvalue "undef"s (such as "($foo, undef, $bar) = @list") was introduced
between 5.004_04 and 5.004_05.
http://xrl.us/tkeq
Buu wondered if you could create lexicals via other methods than "my".
why?
http://xrl.us/tker
Ken Williams wanted a regression test for the change to
"ExtUtils::ParseXS" for $filepathname.
Warnocked
http://xrl.us/tkes
Ron Blaschke had some thoughts on Microsoft Visual C++ 8.0 (quite an
essay, really), and Steve Hay commented that he had reached much the
same conclusion.
http://xrl.us/tket
H.Merijn Brand and HP-UX 11.xx and GNU gcc can make the 5.8.x debugger
dump core at will.
http://xrl.us/tkeu
Phil Pennock penned a message describing problems in
"IO::Socket::INET6" and "INET4" compatibility.
http://xrl.us/tkev
Andreas König noted that patch 28788 to bleadperl breaks "XML::Atom",
so Steve Peters fixed things up.
http://xrl.us/tkew
"POSIX::remove()" deletes directories now, because the specification
says it should.
http://xrl.us/tkex
"Text::Template" fails with bleadperl and so it should, because it
uses "\Q" to quotemeta a string, and that string contains "'\", and
quotemeta is now correctly doubling up the backslash.
http://xrl.us/tkey
Jarkko gave us a pointer to the Safer C Library.
they've done it now
http://xrl.us/tkez
Nicholas wondered if it was worth warning about unused lexicals.
http://xrl.us/tke2
He also met up with an old familiar silly error, and as a result
"Carp"'s cache should work better.
hand the man a brownie point
http://xrl.us/tke3
Jarkko bestowed some portability updates upon perlhack,
http://xrl.us/tke4
and pointed the fire extinguisher at certain bits of code that the
daily smokes were coughing over.
http://xrl.us/tke5
About this summary
This summary was written by David Landgren. My apologies to those of
you undergoing summary withdrawal symptoms. The reason there was no
summary last week was that I spent all my tuits working on slides for
the French Perl Workshop. If perl 5.10 isn't released before
YAPC::Europe next year, I just might have to inflict my talk on
another audience...
In the previous summary, I wrote that Brandon Black wrote "Class::C3",
when in fact it was written by Stevan Little. Brandon is the current
maintainer. My apologies to both for the mix-up.
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.
If you found this summary useful, please consider contributing to the
Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.
--
"It's overkill of course, but you can never have too much overkill."
