This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 March 2003)

This Week on perl5-porters (10-16 March 2003)

It's back, it's back, the weekly P5P summary, after two weeks of vacation.

Pseudo-hash deprecation

Jarkko Hietaniemi asks the gang about the pseudo-hash deprecation in perl 5.8.1. Currently, with maintperl, a deprecation warning is issued whenever a pseudo-hash is accessed. This warning is not triggered by pseudo-hash creation, because the fields pragma still legitimately creates pseudo-hashes. However, the return value of fields::new, when used, will thus warn, being a (blessed) pseudo-hash. This is annoying, because this very warning will disappear with perl 5.9.0, where pseudo-hashes have been removed, and where fields uses restricted hashes instead of pseudo-hashes.

Jarkko wondered whether the best solution would be to backport the restricted-hash-based fields implementation in 5.8.1. Nicholas Clark worries about backward compatibility. Rafael Garcia-Suarez proposes an alternative solution, more conservative : to issue the deprecation warning only when accessing unblessed pseudo-hashes. The discussion continues.

    http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93050.html

Posixly////

A smoke run on bsdos 4.1 reminds us that, while POSIX requires trailing slashes to be ignored on the arguments to system calls that represent directories, this is not always implemented by the operating systems.

    http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93139.html

Imaginary signals

Rafael added a test to lib/Config.t to check that all signal numbers found by the Configure script are positive. Unfortunately, signal numbers may actually be, very legitimately, negative : e.g. on HP-UX 10.20. Jarkko then fixed Configure to ignore negative signal numbers, and put in a couple of other corrections, too.

    http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93174.html

More briefly

Stas Bekman asked how to emulate an eval {} block in XS code.

    http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93048.html

Hugo van der Sanden and David Dyck are trying to find the cause of a segfault that occurs with Parse::RecDescent under bleadperl (but not under perl 5.8.0). This bug prevents Inline::C from working with bleadperl.

Jos Boumans is setting up smoke boxes. He gave up installing Darwin/Intel, an OS which appears to be more alpha than bleadperl.

Fergal Daly sent several bug-fix patches for Test::More.

Jerrad Pierce is working on the FileCache module.

Abigail finds out that localizing elements from the @_ array doesn't work quite right. I'm not really surprised. Bug #21542.

Hiroo Hayashi proposes a patch for the FILE* typemap of Perl 5.8.0, to prevent segfaults with FileHandles in certain conditions. I'm not sure I understand all the issues here. The relevant RT bug id is #21549.

    http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93145.html

Tim Maher reports that Regexp::Common and Filter::Simple can't be apparently used together (bug #21574).

Philippe 'BooK' Bruhat reports an amusing parser bug, #21575, about a lexical hash variable being suddenly understood as package-wise when used in a weirdly-indented print() statement. A couple of hours later, Enache Adrian comes up with a fix.

Hugo asks why the one-liner :

    perl -le 'print $a++'

prints "0". Abigail doesn't find this behavior strange, and (as expected) has written code that depends on this. The discussion continues.

    http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93265.html

About this summary

This summary was brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Summaries are available on http://use.perl.org/ and/or via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org.

I'd like to thank everyone who provided support and encouragements. Without them, I wouldn't have continued to write these summaries. Enjoy !