"This Week on perl5-porters" was started by Mark-Jason Dominus five years ago on October 17, exactly five years after the release of perl 5.000.
Richard Foley and Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes added support for debugging programs using ithreads.
This added the e and E commands for displaying the current thread ID and list of thread IDs,
respectively,
when -dt is specified on the command-line or $ENV{PERL5DB_THREADED} is set.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00187.html
Steve Hay wondered what Perl source code filters should do on failure. Perl isn't aware that there was a failure, so it's necessary to croak from the filter. A Perl_filter_read comment suggests that it should return a negative number on failure, whereas S_filter_gets just returns null, so it's not clear which should be correct.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00202.html
Nicholas Clark found a problem (#31924) in bleadperl:
$ echo die >fail.pm
$ ./perl -Ilib -e 'eval "use fail q{:std};"; $INC{"fail.pm"} = "fail.pm"'
Modification of non-creatable hash value attempted, subscript "fail.pm"
at -e line 1.
Rick Delaney said this is because of compile failures being cached wrongly, and he submitted a patch to make keys %INC only return names of files successfully loaded. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes objected to having hidden entries in %INC.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00142.html
David Radunz offered a patch to Exporter so that it would declare constants. Michael Schwern fears that this will make Exporter much slower and that it might not be that useful anyway because not all constants are declared with constant.pm.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00064.html
David Wheeler proposed having Pod::Man force uppercasing of =head1 headings. Russ Allbery resisted this, because Pod::Man doesn't necessarily only generate regular man pages, though he'd be open to an option.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00230.html
Nicholas Clark mentioned that he plans to go to a four month release schedule (previously it was three months), which means a code freeze on Halloween for 5.8.6.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2004-10/msg00248.html
Craig Berry fixed a Devel::PPPort test on VMS.
Moshe Kaminsky fixed warnings::warn($obj, $msg) where $obj has overloaded stringification.
Tels made warnings.pm not load Carp.pm unnecessarily, saving a bit of memory.
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.