This week -- well, I have to admit that, if I wasn't writing these summaries, I'd have forgotten most the of things that happened this week : because it was busy. Read on for the short notes I've taken about all those recent developments -- pack(), FETCH()es, threads port, et alii.
Wolfgang Laun sent a new version of his patches to pack() and unpack(), which were integrated into the development and the maintenance versions of perl. See the impressive detail of improvements in his message :
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93325.html
Salvador Fandiño sent a patch to MakeMaker to allow to use C++/XS source files with a .xss filename extension. These will produce .cpp files that will be compiled by the C++ compiler of choice.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93406.html
Miko O'Sullivan reports (bug #21602) a complicated but interesting bug with tied hashes accessed from within FETCH methods of other tied hashes. Dave Mitchell knows about this bug already, which is caused by the internal implementation of ties using a shared global variable, which can't be considered clean. Nicholas Clark encourages Dave to write a fix, and Miko to write a regression test.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93355.html
Great news : Perl with ithreads now compiles on Cygwin ! and only one regression test fails (something in the guts of MakeMaker).
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93417.html
Matt Sergeant remarked that the internal rcatline operator (that appends to a variable a line read from a filehandle), new in perl 5.8.0, is sometimes broken, and therefore breaks some code. Enache Adrian provided a fix.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93454.html
Jonathan Stiles asks for a way to assert a failure in a regular expression. Hugo gives an example that inserts the constants
our $fail = qr{(?!)};
our $succeed = qr{(?=)};
into (??{...}) blocks. Enache Adrian recalls the fail builtin described in Apocalypse 5, wondering if it could be backported to Perl 5.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93505.html
Paul Dyer reports bug #21614, about the internal warning Unbalanced string table refcount being issued under mod_perl. It's not really clear whether it's a mod_perl-specific problem, since it wasn't successfully reproduced with a standalone perl interpreter. Nicholas Clark, however, is able to reproduce a memory access error with perl 5.8.0 (but not with maint- or bleadperl), and even able (apparently) to understand what's going on.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93433.html
Jarkko Hietaniemi released a snapshot of maintperl. He hasn't worked on perldelta yet, but a list of changes since the last snapshot can be found at :
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93488.html
Marek Rouchal remarks that the bytecode compiler/loader is broken with perl 5.8.0. Enache Adrian submits a patch to solve one of the most obvious problems : it's not up to date with some of the recent changes to the core.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg93336.html
Stas Bekman asks why one can redefine the active subroutine, but not undefine it. So far, nobody knows.
Last week, I summarized that Inline::C wasn't working with bleadperl and maintperl ; the patch to be blamed for this has been found, it's an innocent-looking regexp bug fix (#18533). Waiting for a proper cure to be found, this patch has been withdrawn from maintperl. Hopefully Inaba Hiroto proposed a patch.
This summary was brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are available on http://use.perl.org/ and/or via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Comments, corrections, additions, and suggestions are welcome.