That was another busy week. Steve Peters has been shaking the bag of (old and new) Perl RT tickets, raising a lot of activity and enticing answers for long forgotten issues. A lot of action in disparate corners which Perl integrates: VMS, Win32, EBCDIC platforms, Symbian, among others.
Do you think nobody cares anymore with ancient Perl 5 sources? You're plain wrong if you answered yes.
If You Really Want perl5.004 Back in Sep 13,
Shaun Daredia started a thread by asking for help to compile perl5.004_05,
which was amended with some clues this week.
Steven Schubiger mentioned there are some known issues compiling perl5.00x with gcc and upgrading would be the best to do.
Andy Dougherty said it could be done by hand-editing makefile and maybe x2p/makefile.
Marcus Holland-Moritz suggested using the buildperl.pl script from Devel::PPPort,
which does the extraordinary work to (batch) build 5.003,
5.004_0[0-5],
5.005_0[0-4] and 5.x.x.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00763.html
Fixes to perl5.00504 and DB_File In a followup to bug #27188, Steve Peters pointed two issues in the ticket. First, the suggested patch which should fix the problem (failing test due to DB_File.pm) had not been applied to the 5.00504 branch. Second, the perlbug mail addresses were just wrong, and Steve attached a patch to fix that. The patch expected to make lib/db-tree.t work on all platforms where DB_File isn't built attracted the attention of Paul Marquess who volunteered to apply the change to the CPAN and 5.9.3 version of DB_File. Warnocked by now.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00577.html
Only a new core module release this week, when Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni announced the upload of XSLoader 0.04 to CPAN and a patch for blead.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00662.html
Michael Schwern and Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes had some observations, which pressed for a new release. On Michael's suggestion, the test scripts were rewritten to use Test::More, getting rid of a lot of clunky constructs. Michael also said that XSLoader should prefer DynaLoader's bootstrap_inherit() should it exist and Sébastien agreed and implemented.
As chromatic didn't understand why the idiom
::ok( ref Cwd->can('fastcwd'),'CODE' )
was used, Michael answered it addressed one of the pitfalls of Test.pm's swiss-army ok() which executes code references. So you almost never want to pass it a code ref. Just another reason for Test::More. (The things you learn in p5p!)
To Yitzchak, use strict did not seem a good idea for a module supposed to be light. Sébastien relieved Yitzchak's concern saying XSLoader is now strict-safe, but use strict is not actually used to avoid the cost of loading it. Yitzchak pointed a forgotten no strict 'refs' that caused strict.pm to be loaded.
After this, Sébastien announced the 0.05 version of XSLoader which was applied to blead.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00864.html
No Symlinks to be Found on Win32 Steve Peters seemed to have concluded the investigation on broken File::Find::find on Win32 with follow => 1. Not being able to tell exactly what change caused the problem, Steve Peters posted a patch which makes Win32 to never follow symbolic links (which aren't available anyway). All tests pass, which Steve Peters finds scary. Steve Hay applied the patch and thought it was weirder before when tests succeeded with a broken find().
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00567.html
Path Behavior on Win32 Back in Sep 17, Gisle Aas posted a patch to make File::Spec::Win32->path behave more like an internal utility often used. Steve Hay reported on a failure seen on lib/ExtUtils/t/MM_Win32.t and proposed a patch to fix it. Gisle, Michael Schwern and Jan Dubois engaged in a discussion where the main fact was that Win32 always searches in the current directory first, before searching in the directories in the command path - an anomaly in Unix terms. That prompted for a fix to the test and the application of Gisle's original patch. Microsoft makes a point of honor to keep buggy third part running on new versions of Windows just like they were used to do and Perl on Win32 has to live with that.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00660.html
Compiling Perl on HP-UX Steve Peters prods Rahul Sharma about the outcome of discussion of bug #37162 about a failure to compile Perl 5.8.6 with cc on HP-UX, with no answer so far.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00603.html
Compiling Perl on AIX Alan Olsen noticed none of the compile problems for AIX 5.3 (discussed in previous week between him and Campo Weijerman) was entered to RT and asked if he should do it. H.Merijn Brand said he would prefer a patch to docs and a workaround in hints/aix.sh. Campo Weijerman posted a partial summary of the current states of affairs, where some unresolved issues remain. Alan and H.Merijn in a long sequence of messages exchanged hints and findings while doing experiments with different versions of AIX and different versions of gcc and vac compilers. That included recommendations to build one's own gcc, use IBM's ld and whether -bbigtoc is needed or not (whatever it is). Maybe in the next week, we see the outcome of all this.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00620.html
Symbian Update Jarkko Hietaniemi posted a tiny patch tweaking symbols and an #include for Symbian, which was applied after a minor fix Jarkko himself found necessary.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00652.html
Robert Spier brought the Perl5 Bug Summary with the count of 1516 open tickets against 1513 in the last week. Nicholas Clark still kept the lead. Robert remembered Queen Mary I, More's Utopia and Reinheitsgebot (which is about beer).
RT in Sep 26 13:00
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00614.html
Perl RT just now
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
John E. Malmberg continued to champion an effort towards adding support to the ODS-5 file system for Perl on VMS. To make it work right, he engaged in discussions with other Perl 5 porters about VMS specific modules and extensions to general core modules.
VMS Modules Peter Prymmer made a few points about adding new modules like VMS::Config or VMS::FeatureSet to the VMS Perl distribution and how it could help John Malmberg's desire to alter perl's tests. With respect to changes to vmsish, Peter noticed that scripts with
use vmsish;
may run on Unix as well, what fosters cross platform perl scripting. Either this would change or John would take the burden of making a perl extension which runs everywhere. John E. Malmberg proceeded to explain how he thought the proposed VMS changes could enter VMS::Filespec and a newly created VMS::Config. Peter told about a number of issues that may weight the decisions about the actual API, including how interpretation of some parameters is arbitrary and at the whim of OS vendors.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00618.html
Adding Methods to Filespec.pm When trying to add some methods in Filespec.pm, John E. Malmberg realized it was not as simple as he thought. Michael Schwern explained Filespec.pm uses AutoLoader and asked if John remembered to whack out the Autoloader bits. John went on to find out more about AutoLoader.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00641.html
VMS::Filespec Update John E. Malmberg posted a patch for VMS::Filespec adding the methods needed for other core modules to properly interpret VMS file specifications. He showed a long list of modules that need to be changed to test for the existence of the new methods, and called for suggestions about the best way to make it work.
Michael Schwern expressed concern about John's long list: too much platform-specific code for a rare case. John explained his rationale was to demand less or no modification for CPAN modules and Perl scripts not yet ported to VMS, something made possible with the new Unix-related modes. He also posted a roadmap for continuing with changes in tests coherent with the new VMS functionality.
Michael thought some of the mentioned problems were basic cross-platform compat issues. He would prefer to see code that works everywhere or things like "if this system has feature X, do Y" but not platform-tied behavior. He suggested John to code the logic in a CPAN module and admitted he meant for long to write basic modules to allow easy answers for the sorts of questions John had.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00810.html
Introducing File::System::Spec After Michael Schwern's suggestion, John E. Malmberg wrote and showed up a File::System::Spec module to abstract getting filesystem information, working for Unix and VMS. Yuval Kogman said how important is being able to ask about a specific file system for OSes, like OSX and VMS, supporting many at the same time with different properties. Michael asks John for coordinating with the work already done in the subject, which can be seen in the link
http://svn.schwern.org/svn/CPAN/File-System-Spec/trunk/lib/File/System/Spec.pm
John made a lot of observations and wondered what timeframe can be planned to release this improved functionality, as it is blocking the Perl on VMS support for current features of the ODS-5 file system.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00860.html
splainMark-Jason Dominus has opened bug #36950 in the last week to say about a bizarre warning emitted by the following piece of code.
use Data::Dumper;
open my($O), ">", "/tmp/out";
print $O Data::Dumper->Dump([], []);
Bareword found where operator expected at /tmp/bug.pl line 3, near "$O Data::Dumper"
(Missing operator before Data::Dumper?)
As Rafael could not reproduce it with maint or blead, Mark thought the warning didn't need to find its way to perldiag. But Ronald J. Kimball pointed it is already there with a variable first word and Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes showed how to find the corresponding diagnostics with the splain utility. Abigail found that it probably has been fixed somewhere between 5.8.0 and 5.8.1.
Abigail's closing message
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00633.html
exit() Status Code Made RightKen Hirsch pointed how the perl code assumes $?>>8 as the status code from exit(), which is true on most systems, but not all. This causes the build of 5.9.3 to fail in at least one platform. Ken asked if the macro WEXITSTATUS() from POSIX module could be the way to go. Steve Hay pointed the existence of ${^CHILD_ERROR_NATIVE} in blead which could be of some use. With Steve's hint, Ken Hirsch made it work for the MPE/iX system, but a couple of issues persisted. Gisle Aas explained the need to override the default behavior of the STATUS_UNIT_SET() macro, something which can't be done portably with POSIX macros.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00646.html
In a continuation to the previous week's discussion, Vadim Konovalov sketched how the build problems could be worked out with helper file and script. The solution displeased Rafael Garcia-Suarez because of the extra complexity to maintenance. Vadim mentioned win32/sync_ext.pl as a precedent to the proposed approach.
Andy Dougherty guessed the dependency tree evolution made the mv-if-diff optimization no longer useful and voted for letting it go. Nicholas wondered ways to reconcile the script's role at the present, but prefers a simple Makefile. Alan Burlison is not sad to see it going as perl build on Solaris doesn't use it anyway.
Mike Guy pointed the bug in build logic was that making Config.pm doesn't require that miniperl is up to date, just that it exists at all. Nicholas agreed, but has no clue how to specify a portable rule to do such thing. Mike Guy and Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes had things to say about the issue.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00565.html
require (takes 1 and 2)Michael Schwern reported CORE::GLOBAL::require and require 5 being broken in blead and supplied a test patch. Rafael Garcia-Suarez filled in the issue by patching the require patch recently applied.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00630.html
In bug #37274, Michael Schwern reported on how strange was the behavior of CORE::require and CORE::GLOBAL::require and how perl could be sent to deep recursion with his findings. Rafael noticed how overriding require() is special to guarantee
require Foo::Bar;
pass Foo/Bar.pm as an argument and pointed that the problem was already fixed by patch 25599. He also added that sometimes contortions to the code, like a new token and a couple of new rules, can be added to avoid impacting performance with an added new flag and test for each time a new unary op is built. Schwern conceded and wondered about CORE::do and CORE::glob which, during his investigations, have been found to display potentially similar bugs. Rafael fixed do() single-handedly and stood staring at the big scary case of glob().
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00573.html
Ron Savage, in bug #37289, reported on a script which made Perl erratic on returning hash refs. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes called for more details, guessing it could be due to perl choosing to interpret the ambiguous { } as a block or as an anonymous hash constructor. And that's exactly what's happening, said Michael Schwern, which called it Reason #19389 to use explicit return statements. Ron tried with + and return to disambiguate the syntactic constructions and everything worked. He asked if it would be possible to output a warning in such cases. Steven Schubiger replied by telling such warnings would be superfluous and undesirable against programmers' habits and the body of code out there. Maybe the functionality could be added in a pragma similar to use strict 'return', but disabled by default.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00669.html
Continuing on a discussion on writing tests for builtins (dated back to Aug 8), Steven Schubiger wondered how tests for getprotoent() could be written and expected to be consistent on all systems. Then he announced to have started to work out basic tests of getprotobynumber(). He called for ideas and critiques, warning that the tests should throw plenty of errors on non-native Unix systems. Steve Hay confirmed Steven's suspicions with the output of a Windows XP box and protocols file of this system. Steven adjusted the tests, hoping to see it tested on other platforms. Steve Hay said the last patch worked on XP, but he's not sure about other Windows flavors. He was going to give a try with NT4, 2000 and a ferret. Steven Schubiger propose that getprotobynumber.t gets integrated to bleadperl so that subsequent smokes will reveal which further adjustments are in order.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00665.html
Compress::Zlib and vsnprintfDuring his work to port 5.9.3 to MPE/iX (HP3000) operating system, Ken Hirsch found out that some zlib defines caused trouble when building the perl source automatically and called for help. H.Merijn Brand pointed hint files could be used and were the right thing to do. Some modules have their own hints folder and one could be created for Compress::Zlib. As the problem was related to vsnprintf availability, Nicholas Clark thought it could be handy to add a probe for vsnprintf on the top level perl Configure, which in turn could drive that choice.
Paul Marquess (Compress::Zlib author) has agreed on the two solutions and said it would be prepared to make it work. He adds that Compress::Zlib only uses a subset of the zlib sources and the beta of version 2 on CPAN uses even less. The most significant difference is that building gzio.c is unnecessary, and that's where lives all of zlib file IO (including the uses of vsnprintf). Ken Hirsch posted a hint file that worked for him.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00644.html
"use Foo 1"This was the winner thread of this week, counting 61 messages or so. In bug #37292, Yves Orton disliked the discrepancy on how a module which uses Exporter and one that does not react to module version checks. In the command line
perl -MTestVersion=100 -e1
does version checking (and probably throws an error) for Exporter-based modules while this doesn't happen with non-Exporter-based modules. Rafael answered this issue is documented in perlrun and
perl -MTestVersion\ 100 -e1
is more like what Yves wanted. Yves' one-liner compiles to use TestVersion split(/,/,'100',0). And that calls attention for the subtle distinction of the statements below.
use Foo 1; # does version checking
use Foo "1"; # calls import("1")
If the later inherits from Exporter, version checking is done in Exporter::import(), which accounts for the difference of behavior that triggered the discussion. Many others entered the discussion, including Graham Barr teaching us a bit of Perl history. The version checking capability (added by him) was meant to remedy the fact that modules that did not inherit from Exporter could not be checked. "I am not saying this is the right way, but this is how it came about." In short, the documentation in perldoc -f use has the final saying and this won't change without causing incompatibility issues.
A lot of lateral discussions spawned from the thread. For example, I have been taught about perl on Windows by Ivan Tubert-Brohman, Rafael (and perlrun), Abigail and Yves Orton. The summary is
perl "-MFoo 1" -e 1 (ok, Ivan)
perl "-MFoo\ 1" -e 1 (doh, I tried this as if Windows knew about escapes)
perl -M"Foo 1" -e 1 (ok, Rafael and adapted perlrun)
perl -M'Foo 1' -e 1 (nope, it doesn't like single quotes)
Another subthread grew from Graham Barr mentioning perl -MFoo\ 100 used for perl saying which version of a module you have installed. E.Merijn Brand thought the unpublished Abe's V module did a better job. Randy W. Sims voted for Module::Info for the task. Yitzchak and John Peacock argued about the pros and cons of
perl -MModule -le 'print Module::->VERSION'`
perl -MModule -le 'print $Module::VERSION'`
Yves triggers the thread
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00685.html
tr// and Character Ranges Sastry and Sadahiro Tomoyuki kept alive the thread on issues with tr// on EBCDIC platforms, by exchanging and analyzing test outputs. To let go the failures, Sadahiro advises skipping the failing tests could be the "best" fix if one remembers perlod.pod clearly mentions that character ranges are unportable except for a few special cases.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00757.html
Fixing Unicode in EBCDIC Sadahiro Tomoyuki detected some problems in utf.c with handling Unicode on EBCDIC platforms and posted patches to fix it. Jarkko Hietaniemi thanked Sadahiro for the excellent work and prompted him for preparing a final set of patches to enter 5.9.x and then 5.8.x. Sadahiro provided some answers and soon we hope to have Perl Unicode working just fine on EBCDIC.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00002.html
A long time ago, in bug #969, Steve Peters wondered why
vec($b, 2, 8) >>= 2
would not work as expected for bit vectors. Jarkko Hietaniemi joined in to say it's a murky corner of Perl semantics, having to do with the all-things-scalar (string | number | bitvec | etc.) semantics. The shift operator treats scalars as numbers, and that's the default way of doing these things. Steve Peters returned this week to figure out what should results look like if shifting bitvecs worked allright. Jarkko replied and glanced at a hypothetical new pragma bitvec under which bitvec operations just work as they should. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes elaborated further with a bunch of generalizations and extensions.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00739.html
There is much happening with maint, which is being prepared for the 5.8.8 release candidate in this October. Nicholas Clark, the pumpkin, declared open the season on warning fixing patches. But do not mess with embed.fnc, as he advised: "Don't change the prototype of any non-static function in [there]."
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00769.html
The two following threads directly concern maint.
NN/NULLOK in embed.fnc Andy Lester proclaimed to send the last of his patches to embed.fnc. Now every pointer argument must be specified either as NN if it can't be null or NULLOK. Newer GCCs will catch it. Answering Nicholas Clark about his next moves, Andy said he will have much to do now he's in charge of PR for the Perl Foundation and there is also MANY warnings on core macros he wants to look at.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00786.html
Where Devel Goes Last week, Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes was bitten by installing a snapshot release of maint over a 5.8.7 installation, which triggered a discussion on when/how to make the version bump to prevent such things.
Nicholas Clark wondered if a different solution could work out: to change where the libraries are installed/loaded from. His first proposal was to install 5.8.7+maint to 5.8.8, to prevent something to be overwritten. The solution made Andrew Dougherty uneasy with the possibility of a forgotten broken 5.8.7 snapshot lurking around as 5.8.8. Andrew suggested something like 5.8.7-MAINT23456, which was immediately followed by Stas Bekman which hinted it could be called 5.8.8-dev just like it is done with Apache. Yitzchak said it could be done by just setting the version variable to this, with the possibility to override the behavior via Configure -Dversion=. Stas said it was ok too and this is waiting for some decision.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00770.html
Nathan Torkington wrote to say he had some passes for EuroOSCON and was determined to hand them to whoever people on list decide. EuroOSCON is the first European O'Reilly conference with no p5p party planned, but with a promising Maker Faire (open to all). Some people nominated his favourites. Some favourites declined for the most various reasons. I bet Nathan thought it would be easier.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00727.html
Steve Peters proposed a real fix, instead of a workaround, to the problem of perl reporting "Can't locate ... in @INC" when the maximum number of open filehandles is reached. He asked for feedback on the patch and Nicholas Clark came to say it would better to produce a message like
Can't locate Carp.pm - Too many open files.
After a few days, Steve committed to blead a patch to do just this.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00738.html
In bug #37302, "ludeman" reopened the can of worms related to warnings reporting the wrong line number. Yitzchak and Paul Johnson explained how it has to do with the compiled form of the code, that does not store this information, using the nearest one which does. Rafael Garcia-Suarez reported it can't be done without adding such data to OP_SCOPE and making the core deal with it everywhere, which is likely to cause performance decreases. Steven Schubiger and David Landgren wondered how the warning message could be improved, but Dave Mitchell said that, without some special-case code, the best that can be done is to report a description of the operator currently being executed.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00815.html
Someone (via RT's guest account) asked about updates on the issue of ticket #36953: a problem on converting between lower and uppercase on Turkish characters. Dominic Dunlop pointed how the desired conversion was problematic and mentioned some references. The behavior is probably due to Perl relying on the locale of the system which does not do the full case-folding as the ticket requestor wants to. Some ways to remedy this: (1) Find a locale which does what you want, (2) Let Perl do full case folding and fix up special cases with regex substitutions.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00872.html
my $v if 0Oh my! Dean Herington opens yet another RT ticket, #37315, on my $v if 0. Charles E. DeRykus pointed that the use of this idiom had been deprecated and posted the link to the thread of two weeks before. Steven Schubiger pointed to a five-years-old summary of the "feature" by Mark-Jason Dominus and the corresponding thread on p5p.
Two weeks ago
http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl5.porters/browse_frm/thread/e665bd4eefa7771c/7f2a47223bb7cecf?lnk=st&q=%22if+0%22+group:*perl*&rnum=1&hl=en#7f2a47223bb7cecf
MJD's summary
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/05/p5pdigest/THISWEEK-20000521.html#my_x_if_0%3B_Trick
The according thread on p5p
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2000-05/msg00621.html
By the end of the week, Leopold Toetsch, the Parrot pumpkin, announced the release of Parrot 0.3.0 with lots of changes and news. Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running Perl6 and other dynamic languages, but you already knew that.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00005.html
cmp_ok Changes Made Visible Michael Schwern has welcome some "uninitialized value" warnings imputable to the new Test::More behavior of cmp_ok() to not supress warnings. This was a Good Thing helping out to spot problems, like these for which Michael provided a patch.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00629.html
Cwd::abs_path Still Fails RT ticket #32406 tells about a failure on Cwd::abs_path when "." is unreadable for Cwd 3.01. Steve replicated it with Cwd 3.11.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00579.html
Issues with rt.perl.org Philip M. Golluci reported not being able to file new tickets on rt.perl.org. But Steve Peters and Robert Spier explained new tickets can't be open via the web interface. They should be created via the perlbug tool or sending an email detailing the bug to perlbug@perl.org.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00575.html
Revert Consting for Tk's Sake Jan Dubois argues that the consting of mark in dAXMARK macro (at XSUB.h) should be reverted to prevent breaking Tk, at least for the maint-5.8 branch .
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00643.html
PerlIO Patches PerlIO got two new test files in a patch by Ilya Zakharevich. Ilya warned it is very precary due to the absolute lack of documenting in PerlIO. Vadim Konovalov also contributed a tiny patch.
Ilya's patch
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00675.html
no warnings "bareword" Rick Delaney pings about a patch to bug #3269 to prevent no warnings "bareword" to turn off too many warnings.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00681.html
printf "%d" Doesn't Play Nice Steve Peters hit the odd behavior of printf "%d" while investigating RT ticket #2580. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes explained that printf doesn't interface well with perl's way of using whatever kind of storage fits best.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00741.html
Setting up Nightly Builds Kean Johnston was interested in setting up a nightly build of Perl and several CPAN modules. He asked how it could be done using the non-installed perl installation rather than the one used in the build system.
That angry sympathetic man, Michael Schwern, gave some instructions on how he could do it. In short, read teh MakeMaker docs. After a while, Kean came back after not groking what MakeMaker docs says and disatisfied about a bad warning of the build process. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes suggested the use of the -Dversiononly configure flag. Michael taught to just set PERL_SRC to the location of the Perl source directory and let MakeMaker take care of the rest.
perl Makefile.PL PERL_SRC=/path/to/your/perl/src
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00844.html
Magic Open of ARGV Bug #2783 started with the report that the magic in opening ARGV could be dangerous. File names like "| rm -rf *;" could do evil things. Steve Peters revived the ticket with the hope that the flaw had been fixed, while Ton Hospel, one of the requestors, said it was not the case. Adriano Ferreira believed the documentation in perldoc -f open and perldoc perlopentut was quite sufficient. ARGV should be preprocessed if one doesn't trust his users and Ronald Kimball remembers safety with -e options could be enforced by using -- before user arguments. The ticket and discussion remains open.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00742.html
Yitzchak's Notes Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes called for two additions to the last summaries. With respect to the thread on list slice subscripting, his intention was to say that people writing non-backwards-compatible code was no reason at all to keep the feature out of blead. To be true, he did not think it was not good enough to keep it out of maint and asks Nicholas Clark "Can this go in?"
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00850.html
When Yitzchak pinged the list about a patch to silence some warnings in blead, it was less to apply it and more to get some response from anybody. This time, Dave Mitchell answered that it seemed correct to him, with a minor glitch he patched.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00851.html
chop and chomp Prototypes? In bug #37276, Michael Schwern asked where had chop and chomp prototype gone?
$ perl -wle 'print prototype "CORE::chop"' Use of uninitialized value in print at -e line 1.
Easy answer by Rafael Garcia-Suarez: in perl58delta we read event though chomp() and chop() are overridable, their prototype however are undefined. "Not a fixable bug, unless we change the way chop() is parsed, which would lead to backward compatibility nightmares."
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00598.html
perl -u is for Dumping David Boyce reports on bug #37300 that "perl -Vue1" dumps core. Steve Peters says it really does because -u is an obsolete switch to, well, dump core after compiling.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-09/msg00817.html
-DT -e 'use warnings;' Crashes Dave Mitchell came back after studying changes he made which caused -DT -e 'use warnings;' to go bang. He actually solved the issue improving the debugging output. Hurray for Dave!
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00009.html
This summary was written by Adriano Ferreira.
Information concerning bugs referenced in this summary (as #nnnnn) may be viewed at http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=nnnnn
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