This was an RC-2 week, rich in events and discussions. Read about the little-known dualvars, the always popular version strings, the set UID perl, Unicode classes, and various other bugs.
Nicholas Clark released a second RC of perl 5.8.4. The first RC was backwards-incompatible with regard to the sperl and suidperl executables, which must not be called directly anymore. It has been decided that now, sperl and suidperl will be regular copies of perl (that is, with regular permissions), while a new executable, setuidperl, will be installed set-uid. This way, scripts that invoke /usr/bin/s{,uid}perl won't break. (This is not a definitive plan; moreover, the plan for bleadperl is still a bit unclear at this point.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040414145128.GI676%40plum.flirble.org
Zefram reports (as bug #28538) that a Math::BigInt object constructed from the string literal "O but true" is not-a-number (NaN), instead of being 0. It turns out that "O but true" is a string special-cased in the perl internals: it doesn't trigger any warning about non-numerical arguments. Similarly, Math::BigInt doesn't seem to have a very consistent behaviour with dualvars -- scalar variables that have a different numerical and string value.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-28538-84956.7.86182961869045%40perl.org
Stas Bekman wants to introduce a new convention about a standard error variables, to be used by perl modules (logically equivalent to what $! does for system errors.) Several names come up: $E::err, ${^ERROR}. This variable would be used as a dualvar (numerical error code and error message), as $! already is.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=407E4D97.6030702%40stason.org
While we're at dualvars, Zefram noticed (bug #28839) that Data::Dumper doesn't output them correctly, and proposed a patch, which emits, in the Data::Dumper output, code that uses Scalar::Util to reconstruct the dualvar. Yves Orton replied that, given the high number of oddities one can come up with in perl, dealing with dualvars was probably beyond the scope of Data::Dumper, which is aimed, mostly, as dumping data.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-28839-85361.16.3440539442637%40perl.org
David Dyck notices that the current version of ExtUtils::MakeMaker in bleadperl is 6.21_02, which is parsed as 6.021002; and this causes problems with modules that require a version of ExtUtils::MakeMaker greater than or equal to 6.03. John Peacock explains that the underbar is treated, for version parsing purposes, as a dot; although people apparently expect it to be parsed more like a floating point version number.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=Pine.LNX.4.51.0404120919230.16344%40dd.tc.fluke.com
Gisle Aas proposed a patch to the Test module, firstly to quote the got/expected values when they contain weird characters, and secondly to run diff(1) on those values when the environment variable PERL_TEST_DIFF contains the path to a diff program.
Barrie Slaymaker points out that he wrote a module, Test::Differences, to provide this diff functionality. Fergal Daly adds that one could use Text::Diff if available instead of relying on an external program. Sean M. Burke (who maintains Test) is pleased with this last idea.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=lrbrlwfdid.fsf%40caliper.activestate.com
Michael G. Schwern reports a strange case where the __PACKAGE__ token doesn't seem to have the value it should (across several files and compilation units.) Further analysis is proposed, but no definitive explanation: there may be a bug lurking in there.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4933BB14-8D7B-11D8-AD86-0050E4A09F6A%40grantstreet.com
Jeff Pinyan proposed a patch to extend the possibilities for the user to define new Unicode classes; notably, to allow to reuse user-defined Unicode classes in other ones, and to combine Unicode classes with the logical operand & (in addition to the already supported -, +, !).
Zefram remarked that a /...(\z/)?/ match doesn't populate $1 (bug #28532). Hugo van der Sanden proposed a patch.
Dave Rolsky says that getting the source code of perl is too hard for the novice porter, and proposes to send patches for http://dev.perl.org/ to fix this.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=Pine.LNX.4.58.0404150902340.17218%40urth.org
Jan Dubois fixed a buffer overflow in the Win32 build of perl (bug #28525.)
Elizabeth Mattijsen found a bug in List::Util 1.08 (bug #28438): returning from a first block segfaults. This used to produce a neat error message.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.8-28438-84380.11.3552556593606%40perl.org
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. Comments and corrections welcome.