Perl 5.8.1 was released. 'Nuff said.
Jarkko Hietaniemi began the week by releasing the last candidate, perl 5.8.1 RC 5, which was extensively tested on all available platforms and with lots of CPAN modules.
Then, three days later, he finally uploaded the final tarball of 5.8.1 to the CPAN, leaving for a well-deserved vacation, applauded by the whole crew for his wonderful job.
The Official Announcement : http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg01558.html
Jarkko retiring from pumpkineering (a word that ispell must be told about), Nicholas Clark is now the new 5.8.x maintenance pumpking. Public acclamations.
The Plan for 5.8.x : http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg01563.html
Andy Lester announced the Phalanx project, aimed at creating a solid testing base for Perl 5 and Ponie, through extensive tests of the most important CPAN modules.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg01549.html
http://qa.perl.org/phalanx/
-i and symbolic linksPekka Savola reports (bug #24000) that when perl is given the -i switch (in place edition of input files), the symbolic links are replaced by modified plain files, but the file they point to is not modified. Although perl could be made to edit the linked files through @ARGV modification, it's not clear what kind of DWIMmery should be implemented here by default, the old one being at least backwards-compatible. Aaron Sherman points out that the behavioral change would be better done at the C level, and not via an error-prone perl module (due to symlink chains and other relative pathnames madness).
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg01359.html
Tels reports that it's not possible to overload log() (via the overload pragma) and make it accept more than one parameter. (Bug #24016). Rafael suggests to define an overriding log() subroutine instead. Mark-Jason Dominus gives further details.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg01384.html
:locked attributeElizabeth Mattijsen notices that the :locked subroutine attribute, documented in the attributes manpage, is relevant only to the old 5005threads model. Then she makes a patch to turn it into a compile-time error if used with ithreads, intended to go in 5.8.x. But support for :locked should be completely removed from the 5.9.x branch, as 5005threads are no longer supported.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-09/msg01466.html
The code snipped that was posted last week by Stas Bekman and that produced a Modification of a read-only value attempted error in bleadperl is now permitted again. Rafael fixed it in a way that, when a magic variable is localized, the readonly flag is propagated only if its kind of magic can handle value affectations. This should protect from bugs as well as minimizing the annoyance for the programmer.
Rick Delaney proposed a patch to fix the behaviour of require() setting or not setting keys in %INC when it tries to load a module that has compilation errors. His patch arranges for failures to be cached in %INC as undefined values.
Mark-Jason Dominus reports that overloaded operators don't seem to work with blessed functions (bug #24033). Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes explains that the issue is that the overload magic flag is on the reference, not on the referent.
David Buckley reported a couple of segfault cases in Data::Dumper, involving threads and/or large recursive structures (bugs #23965 and #24013).
Gabor Szabo looks for the P5P FAQ. The old FAQ Simon Cozens crafted is now outdated. Rafael promises to update it, and Robert Spier to upload it to http://dev.perl.org/.
Tels released Math::BigInt 1.66, just in time for 5.8.1.
This week's summary was produced 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. Next week, I'll take a break, and will be kindly replaced by Elizabeth Mattijsen.