This week, discussions spawned across : manual pages, and their adaptation to perl's audience ; build problems ; interfaces ; conventions ; and the usual amount of bugs.
Shlomi Fish proposed successive incarnations of several patches to the perlsyn and perldata manpages. Casey West, Tom Christiansen, and others, commented.
Looking at Shlomi's patches, Michael G Schwern noticed a lot of references to other languages in perl's core documentation -- mostly to Unixish little languages (sed and awk) and to C. In spite of their historical interest, those references are no longer relevant to most readers of those documents nowadays. So he decided to do something about it.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97710.html
And by the way, while Casey posted a patch to replace all occurrences of catenate by concatenate, Tom explained the subtle difference between those two words.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97687.html
Johan Vromans uploaded to the CPAN an alpha version of his module Getopt::Long (2.32_03) which implemented automatic support for --version and --help flags (based on a patch by Ilya Zakharevich). Quoting the announcement : Since this is a non-compatible API change, the new features will only be available to programs that explicitly require version 2.3203 or later.
This unconventional way to enable these new features was discussed and adapted, after the problems it caused were sorted out.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97480.html
For the latest state of the module (2.32_05), see :
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97734.html
http://search.cpan.org/src/JV/Getopt-Long-2.32_05/CHANGES
Gerrit P. Haase and H. Merijn Brand were investigating build problems under the latest snapshots of the Cygwin environment (1.5.0s). At some point they suspected a broken header file, but the problem seems to be deeper. Anyway, bleadperl builds (almost) correctly on the more stable Cygwin 1.3.22.
Enache Adrian tried to build bleadperl on Windows 2000 with MS Visual C. He gets several failures, and also reminds us about bug #21473 (sysread() and syswrite() don't process CRLF correctly).
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97565.html
Alain Barbet gets smoke failures, building perl on NetBSD on a Sparc 64 hardware, but apparently upgrading gcc helps a lot. He's going to try with the very recent gcc 3.3, that has also been installed by Merijn on his smoke systems. However, perl + long doubles still fails on AIX 4.3.3 with this latest compiler.
David Nicol remarks that the (little-known) multidimensional array emulation works when written $hash{$x,$y}, but not in the construct $hash{@array}. That's because the subscript must be a list, so it's necessary to employ some syntactic trick, as $hash{@array,()} to get it working.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97572.html
Later, Rafael asks whether this feature should be deprecated, and after discussion, the answer appears to be no.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97705.html
Elaine Ashton noticed that the documented method of denoting an alpha module release and the way that PAUSE and search denote them do not match. This remark was triggered by the upload on CPAN of a module that has a X_YY-style version number. search.cpan.org understands this to be an alpha version number, while PAUSE, for doing so, requires that the distribution filename matches /d\.\d+_\d/, and moreover it looks into the module(s) for $VERSION scalars.
http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/msg97802.html
Back in January, Jarkko Hietaniemi asked for a couple of new README documents, README.macosx and README.linux. But they were never written. Perhaps before 5.8.1 ?
Jarkko also released a maintenance snapshot, and he asked, for the last time, for a list of most wanted fixes to go in 5.8.1.
Tassilo von Parseval, who remarked last month that h2xs was not able to handle C enums, proposed a patch for it. It adds an -e/--omit-enums command-line option, to disable the proposed new default behavior, that is to process enums. (Bug #21887.)
Ilya Sandler reported bug #22181, a case of core-dump involving a combination of foreach() and goto(). Dave Mitchell and Enache Adrian hunted it down.
Dave Mitchell remarked that the construct $hash{$foo}, where $foo is undefined, doesn't give a warning when %hash is empty. That would be a bug.
Michael Fowler reported a weird parsing bug (#22231) caused by the presence of the Switch module in a program, and of a comment containing the word "switch".
MIME::Base64 was upgraded.
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