The bulk of the discussion, this week, was about platform-specific adjustments for the upcoming 5.8.1, and other testing feedback. However, don't miss the other interesting topics : v-strings (again), autoboxing, and the usual load of features and bugfixes.
In short : v-strings are back in 5.8.1.
Long version : Jarkko Hietaniemi asked Larry for the ultimate advice.
In the long term,
the v1.2.3 form of v-strings will go away,
as well as the confusing equality between 1.2.3 and the "\1\2\3" string.
In Perl 6,
1.2.3 is going (most probably) to be a full-fledged version object.
Consequently,
the 1.2.3 notation should not be deprecated.
A new notation,
qv[5.6],
might be introduced for version objects with only one decimal point.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-08/msg00437.html
So Jarkko did put everything about v-strings like it was in perl 5.8.0 (except the fix for barewords of the form v65, autoquoted by =>, see previous weeks.) v-strings don't produce deprecation warnings anymore, because issuing them only at the right places would be too complicated. John Peacock is going to produce some design document in order to get version objects in Perl 5.10 as close as possible to the future Perl 6 version objects.
At some point, Michael G Schwern advocated faster release cycles, leading to faster deprecation cycles. Alan Burlison commented with insight.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-08/msg00320.html
chocolateboy proposed a patch to add a new lexically-scoped pragma, autobox (the name of this feature comes from Java and C#). This patch, against perl 5.8.1 RC4, is also available from CPAN. Basically it allows methods to be invoked on unblessed references and on scalars. It provoked a wide range of different reactions.
Chip Salzenberg hates the feature. Other disapprovals follow : Abigail, Graham Barr, Rafael Garcia-Suarez, mostly because they find the new syntax inconsistent with the rest of Perl 5, like pseudohashes were. Tassilo von Parseval, Michael Schwern and James Duncan like it. Alan Burlison wonders about performance impact. Claes Jacobsson wonders if the name autobox is well chosen. Simon Cozens comments negatively on the implementation and posts the source of his Ruby.pm module, that I've probably seen on the fwp mailing list before.
Hugo van der Sanden has the wise word : the core must be adjusted so that it's possible to write pragmas like autobox without requiring a core patch.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-08/msg00314.html
http://search.cpan.org/author/CHOCOLATE/autobox-0.03/lib/autobox.pm
Gerrit P. Haase, Merijn Brand and Jarkko were busy solving problems with compiling perl on recent releases of Cygwin (1.3.22, 1.5), mainly due to evil typecasts between unsigned and signed integers. At some point this ended up in a patch to the stdint.h header file that comes with cygwin 1.5.
Meanwhile, Jari Aalto found that Sys::Syslog doesn't log anything, apparently, under Cygwin (Cygwin does not use the /var/log/syslog logfile, but it should direct the calls to the Windows event log.)
Steve Hay reminds about a MakeMaker bug he found : it's not passing DEFINE and INC arguments to other Makefile.PL's in subdirectories, at least on Windows. After having tried a few tweaks, Michael Schwern reaches the conclusion that trying to solve such complex issues just before an imminent release is not a wise idea.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-08/msg00586.html
Iain Truskett added a new manpage into the documentation : perlreref, a handy regular expression quick reference. It will be available in perl 5.8.1.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-08/msg00436.html
Fergal Daly finds that passing a hash slice in the argument list of a function autovivifies non-existent keys. However hash slices alone don't make autovivification happen, nor does hash elements. This behaviour exists since at least 5.005_03, but looks like a bug nevertheless.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-08/msg00635.html
Johan Vromans asked for a way to know what files ExtUtils::Makemaker is going to install (via make install), without actually installing them. There's currently no easy way to have this information, but Michael Schwern is going to add a packlist target to the Makefile that will be runnable separately from the complete install.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-08/msg00592.html
Raphael Manfredi announced that he wants to revitalize the metaconfig project. The dist distribution on CPAN hasn't been updated since 1997.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-08/msg00711.html
Dave Mitchell fixed something hidden deeply inside the internals of the lexical scopes. As a result, SelfStubber began to emit a new warning, Variable "$nested" is not available, $nested being a lexical variable used in a recursive qr// expression. This only confirms the general proverb : (??{}) assertions break lexicals.
Michael G Schwern found that perl can't be compiled with -Dusemymalloc on Mac OS X. At least, it can't be compiled without further investigation.
Alain Barbet and his smoke armada found problems with semaphores and NetBSD on sparc : they leak. Jarkko disables them. (bug #23216)
Nicholas Clark and Abhijit Menon-Sen fixed a bug involving an unfortunate interaction between Storable and restricted hashes.
Enache Adrian finds that using #line directives nukes the GvFILE slots of globs. Don't worry, apparently this only affects B::Bytecode -- but this prevents it completely from producing any accurate result.
Abe Timmerman released Test-Smoke 1.18.02.
This week's yet another 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 and corrections are welcome.