On Tuesday, July 07, 2009, at 11:03AM, "Paul Fenwick" <p...@perltraining.com.au> wrote: >G'day Craig / All, > >Craig A. Berry wrote: > >> So likely we have an incompatible exit value on File::Copy, but I don't >> know offhand why autodie cares about that. Needs looking into. > >It doesn't *really* care, those tests are verifying that File::Copy returns >what we expect, so that if any of the later tests fail, we know that >something is wrong. > >However the documentation for File::Copy states for "RETURN": > > All functions return 1 on success, 0 on failure. > >So it *should* be returning 0 if we're to be following what the docs say. > >I can patch autodie to skip this test on VMS, or we can patch File::Copy to >return 0 rather than "" on failure. I believe that cherry-picking >079cb8cc5abf40c0b016f9f878493b4d192d85d3 into maint-5.10 should do this.
Aha. On VMS, File::Copy::syscopy is aliased to File::Copy::rmscopy, which is implemented in XS at vms/vms.c:rmscopy_fromperl. That's been returning PL_sv_no on failure and PL_sv_yes on success since the beginning of time, despite what the docs say. Most likely people have depended on simple truth value and it hasn't made much difference. But what I think needs doing is returning sv_2mortal(newSViv(0)) on failure and sv_2mortal(newSViv(1)) on success rather than the boolean brothers PL_sv_no and PL_sv_yes, but I'm no XS guru and it may be a day or so before I have time to test that theory.
