A quiet week for the Perl 5 porters, but some threads are worth noting. Notably, I have now a reason to mention Leon Brocard in the summary without appealing to any running joke.
Leon Brocard is now the pumpking for the 5.005xx maintainance branch of perl. The plan for 5.00504 is roughly the same than the plan for 5.6.2 : build fixes for new platforms.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031126145110.GA28063%40perlsupport.com
Ilya Zakharevich's patch to speed up sprintf() with floating point values and a fixed number of digits was found to cause a different result than perl's regular sprintf() with a perl configured with long doubles. Rafael disabled part of the optimization in this case.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031124070834.GA1658%40ratsnest.hole
Edward S. Peschko proposed a patch to DynaLoader to store the names of the shared object files loaded by perl. As he says, it's intended for use with PAR (for run time detection of shared objects rather than compile time analysis).
Rafael points out a little problem -- the array storing file names should be :shared among threads -- an another one, due to the fact that the shared object files loaded via XSLoader aren't recorded here either. Nick Ing-Simmons gives an alternative way to get the file names from the module names given in @DynaLoader::dl_modules.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031125041718.GB15868%40mdssdev05.comp.pge.com
A patch by Fergal Daly to implement
use Exporter ´import';
was applied ; this allows a package to get Exporter's import() method without all the fuss of inheriting from Exporter.
Glenn Linderman asked some questions about lexical variables, pragmas, eval() and closures. Dave Mitchell, while noting that the current documentation needs to be completed, provided some insight.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3FC3D338.606%40nevcal.com
Mike Pomraning proposed a patch to add a new, optional second parameter to threads::shared::cond_wait(), to be used as a separate lock variable.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=Pine.LNX.4.58.0311232311320.5397%40localhost.localdomain
Shlomi Fish finds that perl's core documentation is of poor quality, compared to the online documentation for other languages. He wants to start a project to improve them. This starts a long thread, probably due to the irritating manner he sometimes has to state things.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=Pine.LNX.4.56.0311271106250.29160%40vipe.technion.ac.il
Test::Harness 2.38 was integrated in bleadperl. It provides a new standalone prove utility, to run tests against Test::Harness.
http://search.cpan.org/~petdance/Test-Harness-2.38/bin/prove
Just in time for the summary, Nicholas Clark released a snapshot of maintperl, Sunday at 23:59 +0000.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031130235945.GB23801%40plum.flirble.org
POSIX::isalpha(undef) (and the other isXXX() functions) segfault, as of perl 5.8.2 (bug #24554). Sadahiro Tomoyuki provided a fix.
Thanks to Robert Spier, perlbug has been updated to the latest version of Request Tracker, RT 3.
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 (and patches) welcome.