Andy Lester reported (bug #31730) that $fh->getline on a directory sometimes returns garbage and other times undef. Steve Peters pointed out that it depends on which OS you're on, which H. Merijn Brand demonstrated on several systems. People blahed at the idea of an argument to IO::File->new to specify the behavior of reading from a directory, though a note in the docs might be okay.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-09/msg00384.html
Ton Hospel needed an equivalent of eval {} for XS code but didn't find any such thing in the API doc or perl source code, so he made his own. Nick Ing-Simmons explained how in Tk he does eval { &foo } by making a CV for the contents of {} then calling call_sv(cv, G_EVAL). (Note: examine btkGlue.c -- Lang_catch, Tcl_GetRegExpFromObj, and do_comp in the Tk source).
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-09/msg00381.html
Nobody knows apparently. Steve Hay tried not clearing IoIFP, but it caused a test to break.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-09/msg00426.html
Tels was doing a require Carp instead of use Carp in order to load it on demand, but then found that use vars does use warnings which in turn does use Carp! So he submitted a patch for warnings. Then Vadim Konovalov noted how he always optimizes Dynaloader locally, so he also submitted a patch.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-09/msg00373.html
Abe Timmerman, with Craig Berry's help, tried building bleadperl (and porting Test::Smoke) on OpenVMS -- on a VAX. It seems there are problems with 8-level directory names like
DISK$USER_2:[TIMMERMAN.KLAD.PERL-CURRENT.LIB.AUTO.FILTER.UTIL.CALL]
If that didn't trigger your VMS allergies, you might try the rest of the thread:
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00020.html
Chris Kelly was vivified enough to report (bug #31767) that
open $1, $file or die;
doesn't die. Dave Mitchell fixed it by making open croak if the first argument is read-only.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-09/msg00429.html
perl@pythontech.co.uk found (bug #31767) that printing from an undef variable prints out junk instead of nothing in perl 5.8.3:
$data = "13 characters"; $data = undef;
open(MEM, '<', \$data) or die "Fail: $!\n";
while (<MEM>) { print }
Rafael Garcia-Suarez fixed this in the development branch.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-09/msg00345.html
Zefram (bug #31793) found that use overload wouldn't work when setting the $Data::Dumper::Useqq variable. Rick Delaney provided a patch to fix overload.pm (with Tels independently arriving at the same conclusion, apparently).
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00008.html
Craig Berry made at least two VMS test fixes:
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00015.html http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00014.html
The thread for bug number $BUGNUM can be found at http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=$BUGNUM
This summary was written by Scott Lanning. Summaries are published weekly at http://use.perl.org/ and posted to a mailing list whose subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. The archive is at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/. Comments and corrections welcome.