This week's summary actually covers two weeks. Anyway, with OSCON, vacations and all that stuff, those are quiet weeks. Read on.
Perl 5.8.5 was released. The P5P announcement can be found at:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040719222147.GG784%40plum.flirble.org
The thread that spawned from the RC2 release candidate and the problems solved by it then discussed the problem of the meaning of readonlyness of SVs. Does it mean that the internal representation of the SV (notably regarding UTF-8) should be read-only too? No precise consensus was reached, although Hugo suggested that a readonly PV can be upgraded to UTF-8, but not downgraded.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040720102342.GL784%40plum.flirble.org
Nicholas Clark wonders what represents the C compilation symbol PERL_FLEXIBLE_EXCEPTIONS. Nick Ing-Simmons says that it's an old, unmaintained branch of the code, no longer used. H. Merijn Brand speaks about chainsaws.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040713143217.GB1424%40plum.flirble.org
Stas Bekman asks a question: how (from XS code) can he store an SV away and reuse it later, making sure that perl won't touch it and try to reuse it again. Dave Mitchell explains the difference between mortals and PADTMPs, and how Stas can achieve his goal.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=41016DE5.40206%40stason.org
Nigel Sandever remarks that sharing an array or a hash (in the ithread sense of the word) empties it. Elizabeth Mattijsen explains that it's a side-effect of using ties to share things, and Nick Ing-Simmons adds that it's expected behaviour (by design.) (bug #30702.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.11-30702-92297.10.3407352468845%40perl.org
Nigel also reported (bug #30674) that perl segfaults when lots of threads are created. This is due to the lack of check for the return value of the internal CreateThread() function. He suggests that perl should die or panic in this case. Discussion goes on on memory allocators. Meanwhile, Nicholas patches.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.11-30674-92219.13.8761503317861%40perl.org
Nicholas found that for 64 bit builds, there is a problem with overloading 0+. He then patched the bug out.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040714125211.GO784%40plum.flirble.org
Mike Rosulek found that passing @array[()] as the second arg to a ($;$) prototyped sub actually passes the first arg twice (bug #30688). This was fixed by Rick Delaney.
File::Find is known to be memory intensive when traversing deep directory trees (bug #30718). Jim Cromie's advice is to use File::Find::Rule instead.
Ton Hospel reported that deleting a non-existent element of an array leaks memory. This was fixed by Dave Mitchell, who remarked that this bug doesn't affect hashes. (Bug #30733.)
James Mastros makes perl dump core by localising $foo and then assigning to *foo (bug #30778).
Autrijus Tang found (and patched) a bug in Test::Builder (bug #30783). It comes from the fact that it's not allowed to store an unshared reference in a shared structure. Thus, overloaded unshared refs are not allowed as test names.
DH finds that blib uses Cwd and File::Spec, and consequently doesn't work to test Cwd and File::Spec. He proposes a patch, but Rafael has some concerns with it.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040722043138.40380.qmail%40web60801.mail.yahoo.com
More to-do items were discussed and added to the perltodo list:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040711194958.GI784%40plum.flirble.org
Among wanted items: a reentrant regexp engine, autoloaded inlineable constants, better patchlevel information in the -v output, and more human beings to implement all that stuff.
Casey West announced the resurrection of the grand Perl Power Tools project (and its associated mailing list).
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-07/msg00715.html
Tels is in the process of releasing Math::BigInt v1.71, which addresses bug #30609 (reported last week.)
Michael Schwern released Test::Simple 0.48_02 (alpha version), and announced that his aegis repository for Test::More is publicly accessible.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040719062510.GA19661%40windhund.schwern.org
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040719165659.GA23035%40windhund.schwern.org
Brad Elkins send some compilation fixes for AIX 5.1, to have PAR working correctly on it.
P Aravinda sent a big patch to make perl compile on NetWare (or, more precisely, to cross-compile a perl for NetWare from Linux). Nicholas Clark raised some concerns concerning his patch, both on technical and on licensing points.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-07/msg00570.html
This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly (or, sometimes, fortnightly) 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.