This week was moderately busy for the Perl 5 porters. The highlights feature various crashes and considerations about Unicode string handling; not forgetting, as usual, about newly fixed bugs, and bugs yet to be fixed.
Tassilo v. Parseval reported a way to make Perl dump core (bug #18045): emptying the %main:: symbol table, and issuing a warning. This bug has been already corrected in bleadperl (it's due to the standard error file handle being freed when it's removed from %main::.) But Tassilo and Andreas J. Koenig came up with two other ways to issue a core dump: using require() after emptying %main::, and emptying %main:: in a BEGIN block.
Rafael Garcia-Suarez explained that this kind of bugs have a common cause: emptying %:: removes the subroutine or the currently executing code, which then tries to walk on a vanishing floor, and crashes. (However he didn't provide a patch, because he didn't found a way to protect perl efficiently against all those cases once and for all.)
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg88248.html
A bug reported last month (bug #17589) had been reduced to a small use case by Dave Mitchell : sometimes, when the incorrect construct sub; (an empty forward declaration) is encountered, the Perl parser segfaults. This is due to the annoying fact that the parser constructs here an internal state that is never restored properly, and this leads to a core dump before it has a chance to report the syntax error. To fix this, one could prevent the parser to get the offending tokens by hard-coding the verification directly into the lexer. Apparently, Rafael Garcia-Suarez is working on a patch.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg87122.html
That's been a long time since the last long Unicode thread. H.Merijn Brand began to ask what was the exact behavior of perl, when printing an Unicode character to STDOUT. Andreas Koenig pointed out that the output filter should be set to :utf8 (via binmode()), since Merijn is not using an UTF8 locale. Another way to achieve this result is to set the PERLIO environment variable to utf8, or to use the open pragma, but this sets an input and/or output filter on all handles, which is too strong in many cases.
What Merijn is actually asking for, is a command line option to turn on :utf8 for STD(IN|OUT|ERR) (maybe a pragma? Hugo proposed something like -Mstdlayer=utf8).
The discussion also implied some consideration over charnames aliases. As Merijn says that charnames is an exception as such, and /could/ warrant promotion of strings with \N{...} to utf8, since \N{...} /needs/ charnames anyway. Andreas disagreed.
Later in the thread, Merijn wrote that he's not volunteering to take over the summaries.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg88360.html
Dave Mitchell reported that nested FETCHes on tied arrays and hashes don't work, because the fetched values are temporarily stored in global variables. After a little discussion with Hugo, Dave announced that he's going to see what he can do about it.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg88288.html
chromatic added a test for the (previously untested) IO module. However it doesn't test yet for the new deprecation warning on a parameterless use IO;, introduced last week.
Dan Kogai provided a patch, on the behalf of Inaba Hiroto, to make tr/// work with Unicode ranges, when the encoding pragma is used.
Dan Kogai was apparently the first to notice that one of the tests to the new Net::Ping 2.23 module fails on some platforms, due to portability problems. This test is now skipped for now in bleadperl.
Barrie Slaymaker reported that read()ing on an unopened filehandle doesn't set $!. Slaven Rezic provided a patch, that corrects also a similar problem for binmode(), getc() and write(). (Bug #18048).
Rafael provided a patch to ExtUtils::MakeMaker to make life easier for those of us who keep Perl modules (or bleadperl itself) in a Subversion repository. Not applied yet. (This Rafael guy also advertised his latest hack, perlpatch2svn, a script that imports bleadperl patches into a Subversion repository.)
David Kernen reported that the -I command-line option split paths on colons (on Unix), as if they were provided via the PERL5LIB environment variable (bug #18066). Slaven Rezic pointed a way to fix this (but, although being a prolific patcher, he didn't provide a patch.)
H.Merijn Brand found that the installation of DBD-ODBC-0.45_18 reports an error DBI version 1.201 required--this is only version 1.30 with bleadperl. This is due to the recent changes in the version handling ; John Peacock commented that the DBI versioning scheme doesn't follow the current mainstream model (which implicitly splits floating-point versions at three decimal place intervals.)
Matthew O. Persico pointed out that ExtUtils::Installed only looks for installed modules only in the standard archlib and sitearch directories, and suggested that it could optionally search other directories (e.g. those in @INC).
Yves Orton began to test Perl on Windows 2000, compiled with MS Visual Studio 6. Apparently non-threaded builds don't feel well. Moreover, the threaded builds on Windows started to show errors on the usual portability suspects: forks and socketpairs.
Dan Kogai released Encode 1.80. Paul Marquess released DB_File 1.806 (and also Compress::Zlib 1.17, but that's not a core module).
This summary brought to you, schizoidly, by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. It's also available via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Comments and corrections are, as always, welcome.