Summary of this week's summary : scoops about RedHat 9 ; the possible future of CPAN packaging ; some overloading ; old and new error messages ; Windows killing ; and other interesting stuff.
Michael G Schwern currently gets a load of bug reports about MakeMaker not working on RedHat 9. This is because RedHat 9 ships with a snapshot of the maintenance branch of perl, which corrects some of the UTF8-related bugs, but unfortunately one of the remaining bugs seems to bite MakeMaker especially bad, as says Jarkko.
The workaround is to set the environment variable LANG to C before building a module.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97360.html
Stas Bekman initiated another of those long, difficult-to-summarize (but-nevertheless-interesting) threads about possible enhancements to the way to build, distribute, install and upgrade modules. This time Stas tells us about the problem of incompatible upgrades, that occurs when a package Foo goes from version 1.XX to 2.00, with incompatible API changes, and thus being not suitable for upgrade for all users. (A good example would be mod_perl 1.XX vs. mod_perl 2.0.)
Andreas Koenig says that this problem can't be solved without a major redesign of the indexing process, but that bundles can be used to solve this class of problems.
Ken Williams provided some insight about what kind of metadata about external dependencies could be embedded in distributions.
Autrijus Tang and Brian Ingerson give some interesting spoilers about the soon-to-be-released Module::Install framework. Or should I say virus ?
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97282.html
Christian Jaeger reported (bug #22042) that, when the <> operator has been overloaded for a class Foo, calling CORE::readline() on a object of this class calls the overloaded function. Rafael Garcia-Suarez showed that a similar behavior occurs for int(), and explained why he thinks it's not a bug.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg96064.html
Ton Hospel produced a core dump (bug #22095) by building a large double linked list and destroying it. This is due to a hard stack overflow. Ton suggested that there's some recursion occurring during refcount decrement inside the perl interpreter, and that (1) replacing the recursion by an iterative algorithm would be a gain, (2) that each step of recursion uses probably too much memory. As said Arthur, patches are welcome.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97243.html
The test suite for perl currently modifies @INC to be sure to always include the modules from the perl being built. Ilya Zakharevich proposed to make this behavior dependent on a NO_PERL_CORE environment variable. The goal is to be able to run the test suite against an installed perl, and optionally to unbundle the test suite. Rafael recalls that t/TEST already includes support to run the test suite using an arbitrary perl interpreter, via the PERL environment variable.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97271.html
Casey West continues his journey through the bug database, fixing documentation as he finds doc bugs. He's not the only one that visits perlbug : Dave Mitchell, for example, reduced old bug #3420 to the amusing snippet
$ perl -Te '@{%h}{x}'
Bizarre copy of HASH in leave at -e line 1.
and explained what happens here, but he doesn't know how to fix it.
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes added a new fatal error (and fixed bug #17718 by doing so) :
Can't provide tied hash usage; use keys(%hash) to test if empty
And here's the explanation : you probably know that a hash, evaluated in scalar context, provides bucket usage :
$ perl -le '%h=(1..6);print scalar %h'
3/8
As an empty hash returns 0 here, this can be used to test hashes for emptiness. But this operation can't be done on tied hashes, and returned until now unreliable data. Thus, tied hashes are no more allowed in scalar context. This modification will probably be part of perl 5.8.1 as well.
Meanwhile, Rafael removed two unnecessary error messages : Final @ should be \@ or @name and Final % should be \% or %name. (The second one wasn't even documented in the perldiag manpage.)
In warnings land : Dave Mitchell proposed to add the name of the offending variable to the well-known use of undefined value warning (when possible and reasonably easy).
Daniel Berger proposed an alternative implementation of kill() on Win32 systems. Gurusamy Sarathy and Jan Dubois provided some insightful comments.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97540.html
This summary was brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are available on http://use.perl.org/ and via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Feedback is (as always) welcome.