As September begins, the perl5-porters, ignoring the changing weather, continue to work. This week, some small things, and a few bigger ones, are selected in the report. Read below.
Elizabeth Mattijsen found that,
while executing a CLONE method (the hook to support cloning of data when new threads are created),
threads->tid returns the thread id of the original thread.
This is because the cloning is actually performed (at the C level) in the parent thread.
However,
to execute some routine when a new thread starts,
and from this new thread,
a workaround is to hijack threads::new.
Nick Ing-Simmons also suggested to implement some sort of post-clone handler via another special subroutine (for example CLONED).
John Peacock, the man who courageously continues to struggle with v-strings, posted a restatement of current objections to version objects -- version objects being what the v-strings should be compiled to internally by perl, in order to make them less unusable.
The thread is worth a read if you are annoyed by v-strings and if you want to have some idea on how they're likely to change.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3D73752A.701%40rowman.com
To quote Hugo, Larry continues to like them [the v-strings] despite various attempts to convince him otherwise, so they are here to stay. I think they could become much less of a bugbear if John's sterling work culminates in a consistent and appropriately documented set of behaviours. Waiting for the v-string objects Apocalypse...
Now that pseudo-hashes are removed from bleadperl, Gurusamy Sarathy noticed that using them doesn't trigger any deprecation warning in perl 5.8.0. Jarkko is considering adding one in perl 5.8.1.
Benjamin Goldberg also started a thread on the implementation-to-be of the fields pragma in perl 5.10.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3D797B2F.2B9B6B10%40earthlink.net
Jarkko Hietaniemi found out that Perl 5.8.0 doesn't compile on Mac OS X 10.2 with the August update of the Developers Tools, due to a small communication problem between the Configure script and Apple's modified gcc 3. He also provided a fix for that, which you can grab here if you need it :
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-09/msg00403.html
Last minute update : has Jarkko dreamed ? have the sunspots moved ? He's apparently no longer able to reproduce this bug.
Abe Timmerman is now the official maintainer of Test::Smoke. See http://qa.perl.org/ for more info about smoke testing.
Steve Piner reported an (already known, IIRC) bug : my $x; our $x; doesn't generate a warning, whereas our $x; my $x; does. (Bug #16922.)
H.Merijn Brand, doing some speed experiments, found that perlio has slowed down considerably compared to stdio from 17805 to 17821. No confirmation or comment was issued.
Allen Smith provided some patches to bleadperl and to perl 5.8.0 to improve IRIX support, namely on long doubles, and their handling by s?printf().
The perl5-changes mailing list now carries the changes committed by Hugo, and all previously dropped changes have been sent back to it, for the purpose of archiving.
Sadahiro Tomoyuki released a new version (0.23) of Unicode::Collate.
Elizabeth Mattijsen, after having uploaded a first version of Thread::Exit on CPAN, found that POSIX::_exit() makes perl hang on Linux when called from within a thread (bug #17057). This problem is probably related to the Linux implementation of threads.
Elizabeth emitted the idea to start a new FAQ section on threads.
Hugo is leaving for Zurich (the Perl 6 mini-conference) and to Munich (YAPC::Europe).
This summary brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. It's also available via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. As usual, comments, corrections and additions welcome.