Due to OSCON and other things, there wasn't much traffic on the perl 5 porters mailing list, but I bet that this wasn't a non-productive week in the Perl world.
Jim Cromie was looking at the basic OP structure,
and wondered why there are always two fields op_sibling and op_next that seem to have the same purpose.
He's willing to try to unify them.
Dave Mitchell commented that the operation might be quite delicate (or in other words that dragons hide in the optree optimizer.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=41092249.9030903%40divsol.com
Slaven Rezic proposed to use strlcpy() instead of strncpy() in the perl core, but that would need at least to add a Configure probe for it. (bug #30838).
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=rt-3.0.11-30838-92699.13.8032172316222%40perl.org
Rafael provided a patch to remove the empty rpaths (runtime paths, searched to find dynamic shared librairies) that might be put by MakeMaker into the .so files during the build process. Marcus Holland-Moritz came up with a small enhancement. Michael Schwern declined to comment yet.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040728105649.71714da0%40localhost
Randal L. Schwartz proposed to enhance the syntax of BEGIN blocks so that it can return a value (at compile-time, being constant-folded). Rafael comments that it might not be very difficult, but that it looks like a feature for blead rathen than for maint. Mark Mielke pointed out a smallish backwards incompatibility with this idea.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=863c3651ch.fsf%40blue.stonehenge.com
Richard Jelinek reported that perl can't cope with UTF-8 encoded source files that mix different types of line endings. (Apparently there is some evil emacs extension that routinely produces such files.)
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=20040729231153.A16115%40petamem.com
Tels released Math::BigInt 1.71.
In the process of doing so, he wonders what is the difference between overload::StrVal() and Scalar::Util::refaddr(). Apparently the later can be used in place of the former. Fergal Daly and Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes provide some historical explanations.
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=200407301527.04010%40bloodgate.com
Marcus is working towards Devel::PPPort 3.00.
David Favor reports that the -w operator is broken for GSA directories on AIX (bug #30885). Rafael has no idea what GSA directories are.
Dave Mitchell added explicative comments at the top of each core .c file. Yitzchak thought it was what the Tolkien quotes were for, actually.
Dan Jacobson thinks that if -i and -w used on the command-line, but if no files are given, perl could emit a warning (bug #30858).
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.