Any busy week for the porters, ends with a busy week-end for the summarizer (old saying). Your traditional weekly summary is out, and many subjects of interest are featured inside.
Elizabeth Mattijsen asks for a way to know whether hash seed randomization is in effect or not in perl 5.8.1 or above.
A first hint is to look at the Config variable $Config{ccflags} to see whether -DNO_HASH_SEED has been specified or not,
indicating whether perl's support for random hash seeding is turned on.
But there's also a runtime setting involved,
the PERL_HASH_SEED environment variable ; and Config is not intended to store settings that vary at runtime.
Finally,
Jarkko Hietaniemi added a function hash_seed() to the core module Hash::Util,
that returns the seed,
(and consequently 0 when no seed is used.)
The discussion then digresses about ways to make Config.pm or charnames.pm lighter.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg00414.html
Talking about making modules lighter, Elizabeth submitted several patches to reduce the memory usage of some heavy modules, (Config and warnings), when used in a multithreaded perl application. She achieved this by replacing some carefully chosen lexical variables by global variables declared with the :unique attribute, so they're shared between threads.
But Liz' patch to warnings uncovered a bug, by an amusing side-effect (it triggerred a failure in the regression test for O.pm) : in a perl interpreter configured without threads, declaring a variable with the :unique attribute loads the attributes module, which shouldn't be necessary for built-in attributes. This was fixed by Rafael, just in time for the 5.8.1 code freeze.
The regression tests that Andreas Koenig wrote for the debugger last week were proven to be rather unportable, as multiple test failures showing up in the smoke matrices demonstrated. Jarkko retracted them, waiting for the debugger to be made more testable (e.g. by making it able to read commands from a file, and write output to another file.) And he added, half jokingly : if someone desperately needs a hobby, for 5.10 I would suggest a mad^Wambitious project of rewriting the debugger from scratch.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg00515.html
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg00524.html
Some of the smoke tests on Cygwin were showing alarming failures lately. They're difficult to trace, because, as Jarkko says, the configurations people have vary a lot, and what works over here won't work over there, and vice versa... Radu Greab finally found that the blame was to be put on a bug in getpwuid_r() in the latest Cygwin (1.5.3-1). Jarkko then checked in gratefully Radu's patch, labelling it as Radu Greab is my hero.
Smylers usefully pointed at a statement by Larry that clarifies the position of Perl 5 and Perl 6 about the definedness of evalution order of complex expressions, that was discussed lask week :
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg00512.html
There was some discussion about the proper semantics of Test::More::is_deeply() between Fergal Daly and Tony Bowden, that spawned several mailing lists (p5p, code-review-ladder and perl-qa so far.) Should it ignore the packages the references might have been blessed into ? Should it do it even when those packages overload operators that may have influenced the comparison routines ? What is the final and definitive answer ?
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg00571.html
Peter Prymmer is working on the portability of perl on VMS. Notably he was sorting out with Ken Williams what should be the policy of File::Spec regarding operating systems where filesystems use volume names. Ken released new alpha versions of File::Spec. See for example :
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg00740.html
Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan discusses about possible optimizations on regular expressions that begin with a atom that potentially matches the null string, such as /\s*,\s*/.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg00477.html
Jos Boumans remarks that perl accepts to run a directory, sort of.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg00804.html
Abigail reports bug #23790, about foreach() being unable to iterate correctly over a list returned by a lvalue subroutine.
Redvers Davies is interested in updating the minimal files that are absolutely needed to get a core perl compiled and running. He needs this information to release packages for the Zaurus. (The list can be found at the end of the INSTALL document.)
John Peacock released version.pm version 0.32.
This week's summary was crafted by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Summaries are published weekly on http://use.perl.org/ and on a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Corrections and comments are welcome.