That's on a week like this that you realize that lots of porters are European (and managed to free themselves for YAPC::Europe.) Or were they, on the contrary, too busy in the big blue room ? On the other hand, the number of bug reports stayed at its habitual average level.
Jarkko Hietaniemi provided a patch to add the -ansi -pedantic flags for gcc on core C files.
This triggered a bit of discussion,
as those B&D flags will be useful for the porters only,
but may cause trouble to casual users who want to compile perl on less common platforms.
Jarkko then reworked his patch so -ansi -pedantic get enabled only if -Dgccansipedantic is passed to Configure.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2002-09/msg00720.html
Jarkko also proposed that the Configure symbol installusrbinperl should be turned off by default. Currently, unless -Uinstallusrbinperl is passed to Configure, (or if you're building a development version), a copy of perl will be installed in /usr/bin/perl, overwriting any previous (and maybe vendor-supplied) version, and regardless the installation prefix you passed to Configure.
Jarkko's idea was followed by a massive approval. He then offered a patch that defaults to not overwriting /usr/bin/perl if one exists, but it will still default to creating one if one does not exist.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020919035818.GE178196%40lyta.hut.fi
Rafael Garcia-Suarez proposed to the audience a coredump case :
BEGIN { $f = sub { eval $_[0] } }
$bar = "ok\n";
print $f->( '$bar' ) ;
The cause of the coredump wasn't difficult to trace : the memory for the BEGIN block has been free'd, and the closure still refers to the non-existent lexical scope of the enclosing BEGIN block, where it looks for $bar -- provoking a core dump.
The problem, still not solved, is to figure out what is the right thing perl has to do in this case (and in some other similar cases, e.g. when there's a lexical $bar in the BEGIN block.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020917232515.7c413109.rgarciasuarez%40free.fr
Andy Lester courageously began to work on the perlopentut manpage, that wasn't actually up-to-date with the last improvements that were made on the open() syntax. He produced three successive versions of a patch, introducing to perlopentut the 3-arg form of open() and the indirect (lexical) filehandles.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020919154346.GA11114%40petdance.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020920035935.GA13547%40petdance.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20020920172341.GA15672%40petdance.com
Alain Barbet continued to produce huge smoke reports, adding new compilers to his list (now with Borland on Windows). He also suggested to build a web-accessible database of smoke builds. And not only suggested. He actually provided a draft application containing his results. Thanks Alain !
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=3D8DB756.3090104%40jupiter.alianet
H.Merijn Brand provided a patch to remove the support for -DLEAKTEST, which was broken anyway (see previous week's summary).
John Peacock told us that he was in the process of releasing a v-string module, version.pm, to CPAN. As he says, the code is intended to be basically 100% equivalent to the code which will be included in 5.10, but backported to perl 5.005_03 ! (or should it be v5.5.3 now ?)
Abhijit Menon-Sen, who was rare on the list these few last months, rapidly fixed obscure bug #17375 ($r .= <FH> not working properly when $r has been undefined.)
The person who reported bug #17422 -- the RT system didn't gave his name -- reported that the GLOB_NOCASE flag of File::Glob doesn't appear to have any effect when one wants to glob a wildcard pattern that doesn't contain a wildcard character. Rafael Garcia-Suarez suggested that this might be the desired behavior. No further comments were made.
Another memory leak problem with shared arrays has been reported (bug #17460). In fact this problem is already known and will be hopefully fixed by an upcoming release of the threads::* modules on CPAN.
H.Merijn Brand is now officially the Configure pumpking (and that's a scary task). The new mailing list perl5-build (at the usual domain) will be dedicated to discussions about Configure and metaconfig (the tool used to generate the Configure script).
This summary brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez, from Lyon, France, a city that's not that close to Munich. It's also available via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org.