Nicholas Clark announced the plan for perl 5.8.8, so it was only fitting that someone should post a question asking how to compile 5.004. Elsewhere there continued to be lots of discussion of VMS, carrying on from last week. All told, a fairly busy week with lots of single post threads, which made summarising a bit difficult.
Nicholas Clark posted a plan for 5.8.8.
The deadline for changes (in blead, to be integrated in maint) is 16th October 2005. He will be "mostly incommunicado" for the first weeks of October, but explained that it isn't a problem. Fixes of bugs in pseudohashes and 5.005 threads go directly to maint and little else does. Steve Peters suggested that changes to re-entrant functions could be another exception, but for Nicholas it would have to wait for someone to figure out how to merge the code.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00223.html The Current TODO http://mirrors.develooper.com/perl/APC/perl-current/pod/perltodo.pod
Jarkko Hietaniemi, fulfilling the promise of last week's "Math::Complex atan2 bug" thread, announced a patch with several pending updates for Math::Complex and Math::Trig.
The result of atan2(0,0) is now documented as being dependent on the underlying library.
Nadeem Douba pointed what he called a small technical bug. He called for an optional argument, rho, to the subroutine great_circle_destination and explained the rationale of a solution. Jarkko countered that he was confused by the proposal, which does not fit the usual concept of radians. The default coordinate system cannot be changed without breaking existing code and there is no correct spherical coordinate system. He proposed a special export tag as a possible way to incorporate Nadeem's suggestion.
John Peacock released version-0.48 to CPAN and a corresponding patch vs. bleadperl. A pure Perl implementation is coming and John hopes he soon will be done with this project. But before that, the PAUSE indexer needs to be fixed and CPANPLUS, CPAN, Module::Build patched to use version.pm "fulltime".
The efforts to make Compress::Zlib work in blead on VMS continue. A long thread developed involving John E. Malmberg, Paul Marquess (Compress::Zlib), Tom Hughes (IO::Zlib), Jarkko Hietaniemi (external gzip support in IO::Zlib). It seems there are a zillion options to configure VMS Unix emulation and not all of these are handled gracefully by the Perl source code. Uncertainty concerning the differences of environment remains.
The thread went on under the subject "Zlib 2.00_03 / Blead 25366 on VMS + patched vms.c" where John Malmberg and Paul Marquess continued the detective work. John's last message is investigating a possible problem with glob() on VMS which can be responsible for some of the test failures. It was found that by just removing leading "./" from directory variables on a test script made all its tests to pass. Craig Berry explained how limited is the home-grown glob() on VMS and John Malmberg notices that, as of OpenVMS 7.3-2, a glob() function is provided in the C library that is better be used on releases that supported it.
Paul Marquess and John Malmberg went on to discuss issues on the consistency of VMS conversions and how it could be made better. Peter Prymer confirmed some VMS oddities on filename handling.
ZLIB 2.0 / Blead 25366 on VMS
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00200.html
John E. Malmberg spotted a bug on the VMS specific Perl_cando() and squashed it with patch @25388. H. Merijn Brand applied it.
The patch
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00243.html
John also confirmed ExtUtils::CBuilder 0.13_01 tests ok.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00238.html
He added a few comments on the discussion with Ken Williams about an enhanced file spec handling for current VMS versions.
The week closed with the posting by John Malmberg of an RFC proposing some VMS behavior changes. Apparently those changes may improve the consistency and precision of VMS perl.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00395.html
After the closing act of Michael Schwern, there was some subsequent traffic. Randal Schwartz discussed using "for example", "such as", "and so on" to say precisely what we mean. He thought it may be used as a general guideline for future writings, without crusades to fix it "in the past".
There was silence for a while. And then David Nicol offered a 92K patch over 5.9.2 replacing every e\.?g\.? and i\.?e\.? with for example and that is. Adding commas and removing I<italics> were left as an exercise for some willing person. No one volunteered.
Michael closes
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00236.html
Randal's advice
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00278.html
Chainsaw patch
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00282.html
"make test" for maint on OXS 10.4 fails lib/locale.t. Randal says: "At least it fails on only one thing". Rafael remembers it's a problem with system locales. Dominic Dunlop notices this problem is recorded as bug #35895 (and logged as a bug with Apple as well - with no return). Dominic proposes a patch on Darwin to skip lib/locale.t tests on locales containing eu_ES as well as Byelorussian and Catalan locales. It applies to versions between 8.0.0 and 8.2.0, and hopefully will get fixed on the next Apple release. Patch applied.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00312.html
Randal L. Schwartz posted a test failure building Storable on OS X. It basically said "no weak references here". Steve Peters remembered seeing something similar before: the default Perl on OS X 10.4 was built without compiling the XS portion of Scalar::Utils. A fresh install of Scalar::Utils fixes the problem. Randal checked it and thought Storable would need Scalar::Util as a prereq in order to have the the issue handled automatically.
Fixing the Storable's test to ignore the "weak isn't supported" error would be the bug report for p5p. Nicholas Clark said that Randal should send a bug report to his Perl distributor asking "why isn't it installing the XS version of a core module?" Randal insisted that 'maintperl' was used. Nicholas and Randal have not reached a consensus yet.
To be continued, no doubt, next week.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00312.html
Steve Peters revived the interest in a bug (#36448) and patch reported by Luke Closs back in July. It concerned a change Apple did in how ar works in Tiger and was a "rather simple change". As a matter of fact, H. Merijn Brand had it in his queue and had been waiting for someone with access to a MacOS-like OS. Nicholas checked it and applied it.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00184.html
Background: Andy Lester has been spending his copious spare time in the recent months bringing const (and other goodies) to the perl sources, the rationale being to piggy-back the analysis that modern compilers can perform as a way to help squash bugs.
Andy was back with a 13K "patch of accumulated goodness", promptly applied by H. Merijn. Robin Barker reported still getting warning messages related to attributes.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00246.html
(LIST)[LIST]->The thread named "perlref Documentation About Optional -> Is Too Vague" has long changed to a proposal on a syntax extension. Prodded by Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes, Rafael Garcia-Suarez applied a patch that made the following syntactically correct:
my $x = (foo())[0][1];
just like
my $x = (foo())[0]->[1];
Sometime ago, he had expressed a minor concern on the possibility it allows to people unaware of the problem write non-backwards-compatible code with 5.10. Back then, Yitzchak answered that could be a reason not to include the patch in maint. Rafael thought that was the case, but Nicholas Clark has the final word.
Yitzchak pings
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00224.html
Rafael answers
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00276.html
Ivan Tubert-Brohman reported on the current status of the Pod Indexing Project, with a nice summary and details. He pointed the perl-5.8.8 deadline at Oct 16, 2005 and the opportunity to maximize the number of indexed files. Volunteers are anxiously waited.
The project page
http://pod-indexing.annocpan.org/wiki/
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00289.html
Alexander Kolbasov kicked off a long, fascinating thread discussing DTrace, a Solaris tool that allows one to dynamically instrument a running program and gather useful information about its behaviour. The first difficulty Alexander encountered was matching the underlying C code to the Perl code being executed.
DTrace is being ported to FreeBSD and already understands Java, PHP and Ruby.
Rafael pointed to Alan Burlison's work in the same area, and pimped his own Runops::Switch module, that allows you to replace perl's runloop at (script) compile time. He also answered, or provided pointers for, a number of questions raised by Alexander.
For it to really work, some adaptations need to be made to the sources.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00252.html
Alan Burlison's blog
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/alanbur?entry=dtrace_and_perl
Shaun Daredia pleaded for help to get 5.004 running on some Linux-type platform. The trouble is essentially that 5.004 is old, and the configuration script gets confused by the results that modern versions of gcc emit in response to its probes. H. Merijn Brand provided a clue as to how to fix the problem, but with no certainty.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00298.html
PXPerl is a full-featured Perl, Pugs and Parrot binary distribution for Windows. Grégoire Péan announced the new address for the project.
The current distribution PXPerl 5.8.7-4 contains Perl 5.8.7, Pugs 6.2.9 and Parrot 0.2.2.
The aim of the project is to provide an always up-to-date build. Vive Perl! Vive Grégoire! Windows users must be grateful.
The announcement
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00382.html
The website
http://pxperl.com/
Nicholas notices how the core regression test is getting more comprehensive. This is a good thing, except that it takes longer to run. He asks: would it be feasible to run tests in parallel? Of course, it involves some issues to solve and he advances some of them. This topic was entered in perltodo which was reordered so as to not scare people any more with brain-melting things.
Yuval Kogman stated that Pugs (the experimental Perl 6 compiler) actually supports running tests in parallel.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00379.html
Paul Marquess reports lots of warnings while building 5.8.8@24637. Nicholas Clark answers most of them are the same errors blead showed up when Andy Lester started adding const to blead. He hopes to see these warnings going away as he brings in fixing patches. VMS or Windows can be broken by those last changes, as Nicholas were not able to try them yet. Andy asks whether he can provide some help on this effort and Nicholas says Andy's later changes needs to be merged and then some work will be in order to get maint warning free again.
After carping on glibc headers, Nicholas adds clean system headers to his growing wish list .
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00371.html
malloc_size and malloc_good_sizeSteve Peters announced the detection of malloc_size/malloc_good_size added to Configure.
John E. Malmberg produces a patch for VMS in order to deal with the new configure parameters malloc_size and malloc_good_size. Merijn applied it and also asked if someone tested for problems with win32. Steve Peters reported to not have seen any problems.
The patch
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00329.html
The fix
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00390.html
Christian Jaeger reported that taint mode still breaks UTF-8 handling. Problems can be seen with code as simple as
use Encode;
open F,"some/file/containing_utf8_text" or die $!;
my $buf;
read F,$buf,10,1000 or die $!;
my $str= Encode::decode_utf8($buf);
Things work fine unless the -T switch is used. Dan "the Encode Maintainer" Kogai duplicated the behaviour on 5.8.6, isolated it and wondered if a POD fix is in order or is it an authentic undocumented bug?
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00322.html
John Gardiner Myers shows a code snippet in bug #37161 where a thread writes ISO-88591-1 encoded data when it should output UTF-8 instead. Code in threads seems not to respect the :utf8 discipline.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00292.html
Jim McKim registrated the bug #37183 about the ability of the tiny script below to cause perl to segfault. No reply yet.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use encoding 'utf8';
my $x = /¨\.\//;
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00353.html
Robert Spier delivered the Perl5 bug summary. 1508 open tickets. 8 more gasp than last week.
The summary
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
Nicholas Clark followed up on a conversation with Salvador Fandiño about how assertion support could be improved, including opening new possibilities for what independent modules can achieve with hooks affecting code in compile time.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00341.html
In bug #37190, Nicholas Clark reports OS X and FreeBSD crashing when using -DT with use warnings; He suspects of a real bug somewhere. Rick Delaney gives some clues on the interpretation of the debugging log.
John Damm Sørensen reports in #37156 on a problem on compiling 5.8.7 on IA64. It concerns a well known issue for which some workarounds are listed and have been found to work fine. Nevertheless, these are not mentioned in perl README files.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00290.html
Rahul Sharma reported (in bug #37162) a problem during 'make test' on HP-UX using cc to compile Perl. It had to do with missing gmake. But gmake should not have being used. Merijn, Nicholas, and Andy Dougherty discussed how it could have happened, it it were a bug and how to fix it.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00291.html
Hiroshi Manabe reported bug #37144, showing sample code which causes very unpredictable results when running under the debugger.
for ($i = 0; $i < 10; ++$i) {
$temp = "\x{100}X";
$temp =~ s/[^X]+//; # bad things happen here (under the debugger)
}
No-one offered any insights as to what was happening. Things like this make you wonder how nobody encountered it before.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00212.html
During work on a Pod processor, Joshua Hobblit found quirks in the POD specs, Pod::Perldoc and Pod::Parser. Should the chunk
bar
baz
parse as an ordinary paragraph or two separate ones (with " baz" in a verbatim paragraph)? Rafael points Sean Burke as the one to clarify matters.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00299.html
Aaron Kaplan reported in #37142 that h2xs produces no code for an enum constant with explicit negative value like enum foo { bar = -1 }. He supplied a patch and it was applied.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00222.html
"Dentom_Sam" states in bug #37191 that he can consistently get the error:
Can't call method "close" on an undefined value
on IPC::Open3. He diagnosed it has to do with redirections leading to failure and suggested a possible fix.
David Austin complains about IO::Select not having a way to distinguish between timeout and errors. He suggests how a timeout must be returned and mentions how it is not documented what IO::Select->select returns after a timeout.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00340.html
Jos Boumans waved goodbye to the last smoke report from a BSDI box, the last one of that particular server farm. Yitzchak regrets they had never got a chance to track an op/int.t failure.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00306.html
This summary was written by Adriano Ferreira with some additions by David Landgren.
Information concerning bugs referenced in this summary (as #nnnnn) may be viewed at http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=nnnnn
Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and posted on a mailing list, (subscription: perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org). The archive is at http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/. Corrections and comments are welcome.
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