Another summary this week, not really different from the previous ones, as it contains the usual bug reports and other discussions. The bugs, however, are new. Read below.
ExporterMark-Jason Dominus reports that you can't write
use Fcntl "O_RDONLY", ":flock";
because Exporter will think that :flock is the name of a symbol to be imported, not of a group of symbols. (bug #25160.) H. Merijn Brand committed a patch to change this.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-25160-71481.14.1614537314423%40perl.org
H. Merijn Brand uploaded the defined-or patch against 5.8.3 to CPAN (which adds to it the // and err operators that exist in bleadperl). However, it contained a minor error, causing the output of perl -V not to include the proper Locally applied patches section. As PAUSE doesn't let people upload the same file twice, Merijn deleted the first patch and uploaded a new one under the name dor-5.8.3a.diff, which can be found in his CPAN directory (HMBRAND).
Leon Brocard released a snapshot of perl 5.005_04 :
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040121100937.GA8793%40kanga.astray.com
Some progress was made on the Storable module. Stas Bekman sent a patch to make it thread-safe. Moreover, Sam Vilain fixed a case of segmentation fault (bug #25145).
Stas wants the strategies used to handle memory allocations on Windows to be improved, esp. where ithreads are involved. Jan Dubois is working on it, but issues are complex.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=400DEA8A.8020208%40stason.org
Alan Burlison points out an error in the documentation of threads pertaining to the interaction of threading with forking. Also, he notes that an explicit unlock() would be more flexible than the implicit unlock-at-end-of-scope that happens currently.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4013DFA9.5030008%40sun.com
Steve Hay proposed a patch to add a camel icon to perl.exe on Windows.
David Jantzen reports (bug #25237) that perl leaks memory when recursively traversing circular datastructures. Dave Mitchell explains that he managed somehow to create a closure which closes over itself. So leakage is to be expected.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-25237-72009.6.72018147677328%40perl.org
Gisle Aas reported that the simple statement
print if foo
doesn't die under strictures (bug #25147). This was fixed by Dave Mitchell.
The constructs
sub foo : unique {}
my $x : unique;
are now disallowed in bleadperl (until someone comes up with a sensible signification for them.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-24940-70133.7.7098418042744%40perl.org
Detached threads now work on Windows, thanks to Jan Dubois. They used to crash on interpreter exit.
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.