A year ends in the little world of the Perl 5 porters, and perl itself turns older. Hopefully this doesn't mean that the development is stalled. Read below what happened this week among the porters.
Perl turned 16 years old, and for this occasion, Richard Clamp released perl 1.0_16.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031218081226.C22E2F5CB0%40phoenix.squirrel.nl
Rafael Garcia-Suarez remarks that the core module SDBM_File can't be built on AIX with the xlC C compiler. Due to a post-5.8.2 change in MakeMaker, the Makefile.PL for SDBM_File was tweaked, and this caused this failure; but apparently that tweak is no longer necessary.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031215181953.631460ab.rgarcia%40hexaflux.com
Alan Burlison also requested that MakeMaker's version cross-checking could be disabled, in order to help his module Solaris-PerlGcc, which allows to compile XS perl modules on Solaris with gcc against the system's perl.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2003-12/msg00621.html
Finally, Ilya Zakharevich proposed patches to improve a few things on MakeMaker.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031218203848.GA7783%40math.berkeley.edu
Stas Bekman filed a ticket for a bug he reported before, bug #24660 : weak references can't be properly cloned between interpreters. This makes them currently unuseful for solving thread programming problems. Elizabeth Mattijsen reports a similar problem (bug #24663) : assigning an object to a weakened copy after cloning produces a panic error message.
Those bugs were fixed by Enache Adrian. There are still problems and Enache thinks that new ones are waiting to be discovered.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=20031218203725.GA1181%40ratsnest.hole
Stas Bekman reported as bug #24641 that POSIX::setuid() doesn't update the $< and $> variables, while it affects correctly the program environment. The same problem exists with POSIX::setgid() as well.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-3.0.7_01-24641-68239.15.8235086069146%40perl.org
eval{} blocksBug #24699 demonstrates that signals handlers, once set locally in an eval{} block, might be restored after the block is exited. This causes problems if the eval was present to trap an exception thrown by a temporary signal handler. Rafael suggests a workaround.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-3.0.7_01-24699-68573.13.2276312695285%40perl.org
Ton Hospel found bug #24704, which demonstrates a case where a character mysteriously disappears in an innocent-looking substitution. Sadahiro Tomoyuki finds out that this is due to a problem with the offset to which the actual char* is stored internally. Marty Pauley proposes a patch.
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=rt-3.0.7_01-24704-68587.10.0650134616711%40perl.org
Continuing a thread from last week, Scott Walters has a clever use for tieable stashes : method overloading on method signature.
Craig Berry ported perl to the recent OpenVMS 8.1 on Itanium I64.
Enache Adrian continues to hunt down and fix memory leaks.
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes found a contrived case where the Too late to run CHECK block warning is not produced (bug #24684) :
INIT { eval "CHECK {print qq:in check in init\n:}" }
Tels proposed new method names for Math::BigInt, to make the interface more consistent :
http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=200312191051.13468%40bloodgate.com
This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Corrections and comments are welcome.