One week after the second release candidate of perl 5.8.1, and as expected, problems were found, and bugs fixed. Meanwhile, development continues. Read all details in this week's summary.
Using a tied hash in scalar context gives in maintperl and in bleadperl a fatal error : this was added two months ago (to test for the emptiness of a tied hash, you should use keys()). However, this new fatal error was integrated into 5.8.1-RC2 and this appears to be a surprising change, probably not suited to a maintenance release (bug #22973).
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-07/msg00971.html
Arthur Bergman finds that the type of a reference to an element of a tied hash is now LVALUE instead of SCALAR. This is, strictly speaking, correct, regarding the internal implementation, but incompatible with 5.8.0. Moreover one could argue that references to tied hash elements should behave the same way than references to regular hash elements. Dave Mitchell proposes to make tie-specific LVs stringify to SCALAR, while other LVs remain as LVALUE.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-07/msg00819.html
$1 scopingSteve Grazzini demonstrates that $1 and the other digit-variables are not always dynamically scoped to the enclosing block, when qr// comes to play. Arthur explains what happens in the guts of perl, but this behaviour is nevertheless surprising (or so do I imagine).
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-07/msg00912.html
Stephen McCamant did some work on B::Deparse and B::Concise. Firstly, he sent a patch to help Deparse (and other backends) to figure out the order in which BEGIN blocks and use declarations are issued, by numeroting them just like other statements. Secondly, he made several suggestions about adding information in the op tree for figuring out the place of those statements relatively to scoping operators.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-07/msg00909.html
He also sent a fix for an obscure deparsing bug, related to ithread-specific optrees, reported a while back by Alexey Tourbin.
Tels explains why external signatures are more secure than embedded ones for CPAN packages. Autrijus Tang then added to CPANPLUS the ability to check the integrity of a package against a separate .sig file.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-07/msg00925.html
Marcus Holland-Moritz finds that since 5.8.0, having hash values set to &PL_sv_undef causes the hash entries to be treated as 'placeholders'. Thus, they do not appear when checking with hv_exists() or iterating over the hash. And this new behaviour is under-documented.
He proposes that, instead of using PL_sv_undef to mark placeholders (which are used to implement restricted hashes), a new global PL_sv_placeholder should be created (and proposes a patch against RC2).
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-07/msg01106.html
Due to an accident and to the OSCON distraction, bug reports weren't forwarded to the p5p mailing list for two weeks. As a consequence, after Robert Spier fixed the mail stuff, we received about 40 of them in a few minutes ! Some of them were already known (or even fixed), though.
Moreover, Tony Bowden walked through the bug database and found a large number of bugs that were already fixed and should have been closed. This led also to a significant number of fixes.
Dave Mitchell fixed bug #3284 : the call $x->isa('UNIVERSAL') wasn't returning the correct value (except the first time) when @ISA was empty.
Alex Davies reports (bug #22967) that study() behaves incorrectly when invoked from an XML::Parser callback. Is it a bug in study() or in XML::Parser ?
XML::Parser and Storable also appear to interact badly since Storable understands utf-8 keys or something. (Bug #23004.)
Ilya Martynov reports that the syntax $hash{BAREWORD} doesn't work with perl 5.8.0 and later when BAREWORD contains non-ASCII chars. Bug #22969. This used to work with 5.6.x.
sauoq reports that using a tainted string as a hash key untaints it. (Bug #22974.)
Alexey Tourbin finds that tied values were mishandled by formats. Dave Mitchell proposed a fix, and Nick Clark proposed a regression test. (Ah, this one doesn't have a bug id.)
Iain Truskett reports an error in the docs for Switch : one should write
case (\@array) { statement(); }
instead of
case (@array) { statement(); }
But perhaps is it better to fix the module to match the docs ? (Bug #22999).
Jerrad Pierce is testing his module IO::Pager for portability and runs into problems, because behaviour changes depending on perl version and IO library. (Bug #23043)
Jim Cromie is trying to get B::Generate working with recent perls.
Tassilo von Parseval is working on h2xs, although he finds it hopelessly unmaintainable. He considers rewriting it from scratch.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-07/msg00899.html
Chip Salzenberg tries to find a way to add additional options to File::Copy::copy() (his primary goal being to add cp -p behaviour). Slaven Rezic proposes that File::Copy::copy() could be made to support most of the POSIX or GNU options of cp(1). Which seems to involve a Getopt-like interface.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-07/msg00817.html
Tim Jenness found out that the ** operator was broken in RC2. Stephen McCamant fixed it.
Ilya Martynov backported Data::Dumper on CPAN. The latest and greatest Data::Dumper is now available for perl 5.6.1 !
This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and on a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Comments, corrections, additions, and suggestions are (as always) welcome.