This Week on perl5-porters - 3-10 February 2008
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason: "It would be a shame if we shipped a perl
with known segfaults."
Nicholas Clark (ever the pragmatist): "It wasn't solved in 5.8.8
so it's not a regression."
Topics of Interest
"pp_const" not that hot?
Nicholas Clark looked at an execution profile, and saw that in a given
workset, "pp_const" is called around 200 million times, and in "if"
statement within is taken only 3000 times. Since the decision to take
it or not is known at compile time, it could be split into two
discrete ops which could only be a win.
No takers, but definitely a nice self-contained project for someone
who wants to dip their toe in the p5p waters.
had I infinite tuits
http://xrl.us/bf8gq
New snapshot for 5.8.9 (Perl @ 33218)
Last Saturday (the 2nd of February), Nicholas made 65 commits in a row
to the Perforce repository, thus raising the number of commits in the
repository to 33218.
He then posted a snapshot of what will become Perl 5.8.9, alas,
slightly too late on Saturday afternoon to be included in the previous
summary (which cuts off at around 16:00 UTC).
Apart from various known issues like IRIX and C++ compilers, Nicholas
was very interesting in hearing how it coped on VMS, since he
integrated lots of changes from 5.10 pertaining to VMS, and wasn't
sure if his selection was sufficient.
Jerry D. Hedden pointed out that some of errors on the Cygwin platform
could be solved by backing out a change dealing with consting.
Andy Armstrong offered to add "dtrace" support (now that he's an
expert having already done it for 5.10). Nicholas hoped he could
backport it from the 5.10 track, assuming it gets into what will be
5.10.1.
Craig Berry promised to review the VMS changes. H.Merijn Brand tweaked
his 5.8-dor patch to make sure it could still add the "//" defined-or
operator to 5.8.
released before christmas
http://xrl.us/bf8gs
Jerry asked whether he should try to fix some of the warnings that
were cropping up in recent builds; Nicholas said he hoped to locate
the secret patch that, if applied, would make them all go away.
http://xrl.us/bf8gu
Jarkko Hietaniemi buzzed Mark Lutz, who works at a large aerospace
firm and has access to some some serious hardware. He reported success
on an SGI but gave up on a Cray X1.
David Cantrell reported compilation success on a Cray YMP, albeit with
a number of test failures.
http://xrl.us/bf8gw
Dave also mentioned that his NetBSD/alpha was perfect barring one
single failure in POSIX/t/sigaction.t.
http://xrl.us/bf8gy
Data corruption in CPAN shell?
H.Merijn Brand reported problems with the CPAN shell. Andreas König
mentioned that Frank Wiegand had identified the cause as being a
recent version of "Safe" and that H.Merijn should downgrade to Safe
version 1.12. (Only 5.8.8 is affected, 5.10 is fine).
Rafael thought he had fixed it with change #33236, it being something
to do with version objects being returned from Safe compartments. John
Peacock identified the interaction problem between "version.pm" and
"Safe", and suggested Rafael release his fix in Safe 1.15 and all
would be well.
playing it safe
http://xrl.us/bf8g2
Possible Y2038 solution
Michael G. Schwern mentioned a solution he had heard about concerning
the Y2038 problem, which is bring dates beyond back to before 2038 and
run it through 64-bit safe routines in order to derive the correct
time zone and daylight savings information.
licence-friendly code
http://www.2038bug.com/pivotal_gmtime_r.c.html
Jesse Vincent pointed out that this approach will fail whenever
timezones change, the most recent high-visibility exemplar of which
was the USA's daylight savings changes in 2007.
Ben Morrow thought that we could only do so much without shipping a
full timezone database. The conversation continued into excruciating
detail about the periodicity of calendars and how to deal with
daylight savings tweakages.
http://xrl.us/bf8g4
As part of his research, Michael asked for a table of post-2038 times
from a 64 bit system. Mark Mielke provided him with enough data to
keep him going 700 years.
my 600th birthday is on a Saturday
http://xrl.us/bf8g6
64 bit "localtime_r()" on 32 bit "time_t" machines
Michael then delivered some experimental code to provide 64-bit time
routines suitable for 32-bit hardware. Jan Dubois wondered about the
licensing issues (since Michael had used code from 2038bug.com).
Andy Dougherty explained how to make the code more platform agnostic.
Michael explained that the code needs quite a bit of work still and
pointed out the areas where he was not happy. Andy thought that much
of the problems could be addressed with Configure probes, and promised
to get a round tuit.
http://xrl.us/bf8g8
perl compiler, continued
David Nicol wondered if Reini Urban's compiler work would allow, for
example, a known IV passed to a function to be passed as a bare "int",
thereby removing a certain amount of indirection required to get from
the pointer to an "SV" down to the raw "int".
http://xrl.us/bf8ha
op/sprintf.t and op/write.t failures with "mingw-runtime-3.14"
Rob Sisyphus reported that the changes made to the MinGW runtime in
order to have a C99-compliant "libmingwex", and said he'd file a bug
with them.
http://xrl.us/bf8hc
Slowdown in 5.10.0 regexes with atomic patterns
Dave Mitchell admitted to having chopped some code out of the regexp
engine that dealt with the super-linear positive cache (no, I don't
know what it does) on the grounds that he couldn't figure out how it
could be triggered, nor did anything in the test suite tickle it. And
it got in the way of making the regexp engine non-recursive.
Moritz Lenz replied that fixing it up was probably not that important
since the test case was rather pathological, insofar that if someone
were to write such a pattern and encounter the slowdown, it would be
easy to reformulate it to avoid the problem.
not really a bug
http://xrl.us/bf8he
OpenVMS largefile "getpos"/"setpos"
Hein van den Heuvel was wondering why Perl couldn't deal with large
files (>2GiB) out of the box, since the information returned by
"getpos" (a.k.a. "tell") is an opaque cookie that is passed to
"setpos" (a.k.a. "seek") as required. Therefore perl should just use
that, and get large file handling for free.
Craig Berry thought that the interface was cracked open and exposed to
be compatible with "seek" and "tell". If people didn't really that, he
proposed a two-line fix that restore the native VMS file positioning
behaviour.
peeking behind the curtain
http://xrl.us/bf8hg
Patches of Interest
"win32_async_check()" didn't loop enough
In the beginning, "win32_async_check()" could interact poorly with
"win32_msgwait", and the denizens of the Win32::GUI mailing list
determined that it could go into an infinite loop and consume all
available CPU. It was subsequently patched to prevent this occurring,
but the balance swung the other way, and caused 30 second DDE timeouts
because it didn't loop enough. Robert May provided a patch to find the
middle ground, and this Rafael applied.
the goldilocks syndrome
http://xrl.us/bf8hi
Give Win32 message windows proper window procedures
Robert May then provided a second patch to improve the "alarm" and
"kill" implementations on Win32. Rafael applied the patch to blead,
and if everything checks out correctly, it may be backportable it to
5.10.
wake up, time to die
http://xrl.us/bf8hk
sv.c consting
Steven Schubiger added some consting goodness to sv.c, which Rafael
applied. So he did it again, and Rafael applied that too. And then
again, and still Rafael followed. But then Steven delivered a fourth
patch of consting goodness, but it didn't get applied.
repeat as necessary
http://xrl.us/bf8hn
Extend t/test.pl:runperl routine to set subprocess ENV
Jim Cromie was looking at the XML output from a MAD run, and needed to
be able to specify an environment variable beforehand, and so set
about adding a general mechanism to test.pl.
Nicholas cautioned about the dangers of being insufficiently
shell-agnostic, and suggested a hash key/value approach to let each
platform implement the initialisation of the environment.
http://xrl.us/bf8hp
Feature bundles are the same across all subversions
Rafael applied Steffen Müller's patch that ensures that any specific
feature request (such as "use feature 5.10.3") gets the same set of
features as "use feature 5.10".
The result is a little drastic but there doesn't seem a way around the
possible inconsistencies that may arise. So, for now, the porters
promise that no new features will be added in 5.10 (that would require
an extension to the "feature" pragma, other new, non-"feature"
features are fair game).
the features remain the same
http://xrl.us/bf8hr
"mg_magical()" sometimes turns "SvRMAGICAL" on when it shouldn't
Vincent Pit returned to his magical patch with some test cases that
demonstrated the problem.
http://xrl.us/bf8ht
Unwanted warnings from "PerlIO::scalar"
Hugo van der Sanden explained that his caution regarding the correct
use of magic in Ben Morrow's patch for "PerlIO::scalar" was not meant
to kill the patch dead. Ben Morrow responded with what he thought was
a change that resolved the issue, although he wished there was a
perlmagic.pod that would explain the finer points of magic.
Rafael thought that the patch looked good enough to take.
http://xrl.us/bf8hv
Optimize "OP_IS_(FILETEST|SOCKET)" macros
Jim Cromie reworked opcode.pl to generate more efficient macros
written to opcode.h, by relying on the property of consecutive opcode
numbers. Nicholas was very impressed, as this shaved 300 bytes off the
size of util.o.
Jim followed up with another tweak that resulted in a dozen or so
bytes being saved.
cache dispenser
http://xrl.us/bf8hx
Watching the smoke signals
The most recent 5.8.9-to-be smoke failure on Windows, courtesy of
Steve Hay.
Smoke [5.8.8] 33205 FAIL(F) MSWin32 WinXP/.Net SP2 (x86/2 cpu)
http://xrl.us/bf8hz
And a series of blead failures, also from Steve, the most recent of
which is
Smoke [5.11.0] 33261 FAIL(F) MSWin32 WinXP/.Net SP2 (x86/2 cpu)
http://xrl.us/bf8h3
New and old bugs from RT
Hints for IRIX (#33849)
Andy Dougherty wrapped up the compiler issues on IRIX with a patch,
that Rafael applied. Now to see if it works.
http://xrl.us/bf8h5
Residual threads crash (#45053)
Jerry D. Hedden reported that change #31864, designed to resolve bug
#45053 made a valiant attempt at perfection, but if you run the test
script repeated, it will emit periodically the message "Bad free()
ignored (PERL_CORE) during global destruction."
http://xrl.us/bf8h7
"IO::Handle" method "say" should ignore $\ (#49266)
"Fixed in bleadperl by change #33258" -- Rafael
http://xrl.us/bf8h9
"Scalar::Util" - documentation problem (#49434)
Steve Peters excised the reference to a book mentioned in the
documentation that will never see the light of day.
http://xrl.us/bf8ib
Attributes + Unknown Error (#49472)
Andreas König's binary search revealed that the bug (bad diagnostics)
was introduced with change #31255. Nicholas helpfully reposted the
entire patch to the list. Dave Mitchell took one look at it and posted
change #33265 three hours later to fix it.
http://xrl.us/bf8id
Segfault on "perl -e 'split //, unpack "(B)*", "ab"'" (#50256)
Nicholas got to the bottom of the issue: "split" imposes scalar
context on "unpack", and parens in unpack templates had, um shall we
say, undefined behaviour in scalar context.
behavioural modification
http://xrl.us/bf8if
perlop.pod - misnomer in % operator documentation (#50364)
Martin Becker's documentation tweak regarding modulus and common
residues was accepted.
http://xrl.us/bf8ih
"Filter::Util::Call" problem with $_ (#50430)
Steve Hay twiddled the filter code to make the problem go away and
also didn't break anything else in the tests, but was hoping someone
more skilled in the art of filters would care to comment.
say we just called them a failed experiment?
http://xrl.us/bf8ij
"keys %+" does not return the correct keys (#50496)
Jonas Kramer reported a bug with two issues, one of which was due to
POD formatting issues on his terminal that causes "%-" to be rendered
as "%?". Don't laugh, people lose satellites for less than this.
The other issue was confirmed to be a true bug by Abigail, who went on
to write some TODO tests for t/op/pat.t lest they be forgotten.
http://xrl.us/bf8im
Perl 5.10.0 segfaults on "format" with "my" variables (#50528)
Stephan Springl delivered a delightfully concise test program to show
how to make 5.10.0 coredump. It turns out that this is actually a
marginal improvement over 5.8, since the same program will run the
code without crashing, but will give the wrong results.
Dave Mitchell figured out what the problem and suggested two lines of
enquiry to explore. Unfortunately he was waiting for a new delivery of
tuits and was thus unable to do anything more.
beware the abominable newATTRSUB
http://xrl.us/bf8io
Compiling the latest 5.8 snapshot on QNX (#50530)
Matt Kraai reported difficulty getting Perl 5.8 up and running on QNX.
"getcwd" seemed to be giving grief, as do possibly unsigned "time_t"
data types.
Nicholas made some suggestions which cleared up some, but not all,
errors.
http://xrl.us/bf8iq
"when( @n && %n )" fails to smart match (#50538)
brian d foy filed a bug report following his request for comments on
the behaviour of "&&" in a "when" clause. His argument was that the
documentation does not coincide with the implementation, but didn't
know which one needed to be fixed.
could be a feature
http://xrl.us/bf8is
Storable does not store "REGEXP" items (#50608)
"sand" (who I suspect is really Andreas Köenig's sandbox) filed a
reminder bug to point out that "Storable" needs to be updated to
handle the new "REGEXP" datatype in 5.11.
http://xrl.us/bf8iu
CPAN shell bug on AIX 5.3 (#50612)
Joachim Görner built a 5.8.8 on AIX. When he tried to run a CPAN
shell, it appeared to have trouble downloading the CPAN indices,
trying to rename a file that doesn't exist.
He pointed out that 5.8.2 works correctly on the same machine.
http://xrl.us/bf8iw
Perl5 Bug Summary
289 new + 1494 open = 1783 (10 created, 39 closed)
ooh, someone's been busy
http://xrl.us/bf8iy
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
This is the BBC
Devel-StackTrace 1.15
Dave Rolsky announced a fix in the shape of 1.16, available on
CPAN.
http://xrl.us/bf8i2
New Core Modules
B::Generate 1.12_04
Jim Cromie made a new release that works on both 5.10 and 5.8.
http://xrl.us/bf8i4
ExtUtils::MakeMaker 6.43_01
Michael G. Schwern released a development version of the venerable
ExtUtils::MakeMaker module. Rafael and Steve Peters brought blead
up to date with the latest goodies.
http://xrl.us/bf8i6
In Brief
Moritz Lenz figured out that the weird "__stack_ck_chk_fail_local"
errors was caused by compiling with "-fstack-protector". Take it out
and everything is fine. Andy Dougherty said he'd look at providing a
better test for "Configure".
back to the drawing board
http://xrl.us/bf8i8
Jarkko Hietaniemi revived an two year old message from the depths of
his outbox regarding the possibility of intercepting a possible
segmentation fault with "unpack 'P'".
http://xrl.us/bf8ja
H.Merijn Brand reported that gcc-4.2.3, HP-UX 11.23 and blead is not a
recipe for happiness.
back to 3.4.6
http://xrl.us/bf8jc
Jerry D. Hedden asked for, and received, co-maintenance of
"Thread::Queue". It's now dual-lifed, and so we may expect exciting
new features on CPAN.
http://xrl.us/bf8je
Yamashina Hio had some more questions about POD's L<> codes but
received no answers.
http://xrl.us/bf8jg
Vincent Pit saw that "mg_copy" ought to take an "I32" instead of an
"int", and so it was done.
http://xrl.us/bf8ji
Alas, Jerry D. Hedden pointed out that this unfortunately causes
"initialization from incompatible pointer type" warnings in
"threads::shared". He wondered if there were 32/64-bit issues at hand,
and if so, what was the best way to resolve them.
http://xrl.us/bf8jk
Jim Cromie added some simple tests to validate "-Dx" output saying
that it wasn't the most important thing in the world, but it might be
helpful to know if and when the output changes in subtle ways.
canary in a perl mine
http://xrl.us/bf8jn
Jim Cromie thought Nicholas's expand-macros.pl trick was so useful, he
gave it the ability to pretty-print the macro expansions.
http://xrl.us/bf8jp
Jerry D. Hedden wrote a patch that added a lot of tests for read-only
variables.
unapplied
http://xrl.us/bf8jr
José Auguste-Etienne posted a patch to hints/aix_4.sh to allow builds
on AIX 4.2 to succeed. Applied.
http://xrl.us/bf8jt
Slaven Rezic is the current Tk maintainer.
security patches welcome
http://xrl.us/bf8jv
About this summary
last week's news
http://xrl.us/bf8jx
This summary was written by David Landgren.
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.
