The porters mailing list was crowded with recurrent themes on multiple threads this week.
Paul Marquess led a lot of action on Compress::Zlib front.
Much interaction and many fixes for latent and old issues.
Compress::ZlibThis week has seen lots of action in Compress::Zlib front,
led by Paul Marquess.
At least six threads were directly related to the compression module.
After a report on a test failure on Cygwin, Paul Marquess kept his promise to make t/14gzopen.t more robust. And then Paul attacked utf8 errors reported by recent smokes. And there was also a patch to silence warnings on AIX.
The patches
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00225.html
The utf8 errors survived the first approach and prompted for more investigation. Dominic Dunlop reported Mac OS X were quite happy with all tests succeeding. H.Merijn Brand remembered the tricky part was that, while passing manual runs, failures were showing up while the test suite run from a smoke. Paul traced the trouble to issues with the binmode treatment for filehandles in a number of tests: it was hard for making Linux, Sun, AIX, Win32, HP-UX, Mac OS X satisfied at the same time.
UTF-8 errors are back
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00274.html
Fighting UTF-8 smokes
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00336.html
Steve Hay noticed bleadperl smokes on Win32 have been failing in test 09gziphdr.t and crashing perl. Paul has agreed that it looked like a memory corruption issue and produced a patch so that Win32 smokes can resume normally again.
Steve Hay reports
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00271.html
Paul Marquess nails things down
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00420.html
There were also a thread involving an issue about Compress::Zlib Makefile.PL in perl core, driven by Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes and E.Merijn Brand, which sorted out some build details. In "Perl on Symbian", you read about Jarkko's working out C::Z in the Symbian port, where running tests in the device still looks like a dream. Compress::Zlib 2.000_05 is reaching the high time in blead.
C::Z Makefile.PL revised for Cygwin
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00215.html
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes found some segfaults in recent main builds on Cygwin. Together with Nicholas Clark, they traced the issue down to a destruction ordering bug, which could affect other platforms and squashed it.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00200.html
H.Merijn Brand reported that after the PERL_CORE patch, Cygwin does not dump core on blead anymore, failing two tests, one at Compress::Zlib and other with POSIX signals. Paul Marquess pointed the finger to issues with 14gzopen.t and prepared a patch to make it more robust (see "Compress::Zlib"). Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes reported the sigaction failure went away with the last Cygwin improvements.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00220.html
Steve Peters reported bugs #36665 ("delete $ENV{FOO} leaves $FOO visible in subprocesses on Cygwin Perl") and #30952 ("qx() problems with local environment variables on Cygwin/Perl 5.8.2") had to do with Perl's handling of environment variables when compiled with -DPERL_USE_SAFE_PUTENV. This was fixed in bleadperl with change #25737. (Read more on "Environmental Recovery".)
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00291.html
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00292.html
-F SwitchSteve Peters followed on the bug report #37366 by John Krahn. The issue is that a space cannot be used in patterns supplied as arguments to the -F switch. Rafael Garcia-Suarez remembered it's a feature to make -F work on #! lines, now documented in blead. Rick Delaney thought this limitation could be lifted in the case when implicit delimiters were given and implemented it. Rafael pointed problems because you can't rely on doing the argument splitting yourself, something that "helpful kernels" could do for you. David Landgren showed Rick how FreeBSD could be more helpful than Linux and that perl was not in fault wrt awk. David also remembered you can always use "\x20" instead of spaces in patterns.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00372.html
Jarkko Hietaniemi posted updates for Symbian on blead. Among the concerned issues, some fixes for Compress::Zlib allowed the DLL to build and link successfully. Paul Marquess noted the changes to the zlib source. Jarkko explained the changes have to do with the fact that a DLL in Symbian cannot have writable data. After a while, Paul announced Jarkko's patch was accepted to enter into the official zlib source. Another new feature of the Symbian port 0.2.0 is the introduction of another way of starting a Perl app in Series 60, packaging scripts and modules into SIS files.
Symbian on blead patch
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00234.html
The "sisify.pl" patch
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00344.html
malloc_wrap, the Default?Alan Burlison questioned why malloc_wrap had become the default behavior and if the decision had to do with performance. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes explained the goal of malloc_wrap is to prevent situations where an overflow on multiplication causes a different amount of memory to be allocated. There ensued some discussion on playing whack-a-mole with compilers: Alan were seeing too much warnings with Forte compilers and Dave Mitchel said the macro was recently hacked to avoid warnings on gcc.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00249.html
Without much ado, Paul Marquess brought a patch to sync blead and CPAN with respect to DB_File 1.1812.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00204.html
Sébastien Aperghis-Tramonis also announced a patch to bring XSLoader to version 0.06.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00488.html
Module::Build Applies for CoreKen Williams announced the release of Module::Build 0.27_03, which is the last major feature-adding beta release before 0.28. Ken asked if it's not time for this version to get pulled into the core. Warnocked by now.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00258.html
Gisle Aas noticed that Win32::GetShortPathName() does not return shorter results (those ugly SHORTN~2) all the time and posted a patch to update the documentation. While on this, he also fixed Test/Harness/Straps.pm which relied on this misleading functionality.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00230.html
Abigail opened RT ticket #37407 to tell about a malfunction of the postponed regex construction /(??{"(PAT)"})/. The $1 variable is not correctly set. Rick Delaney regretted the matched groups cannot be got and suggested documentation should change. On the other hand, the construction provides the only way to get reusable self-contained regexps with backreferences, which is pretty important to Rick and also Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan, Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes and Dave Mitchell entered this mind-bending discussion. A part of the solution for the raised issues rests in Dave Mitchell's hands and his promised re_eval rewrite - may Duke Nukem Forever be soon released.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00269.html
Discussion continued this week on the Perl's handling of environment variables which was triggered by a problem seen at Solaris 10. And that's a long long continuation, regarding POSIX interfaces, probes, Solaris, AIX, etc.
Summarized here
http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/2005/20051003.html#Environmental_damage_on_Solaris_10
Continued this week
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00238.html
A new thread started (with subject "environ fixup") after the probe for unsetenv() was added by E.Merijn Brand. Alan Burlison had been working out how to make use of the new probe and Rafael Garcia-Suarez gave pointers. It might as well impact Symbian, EPOC and Cygwin. And it did. At least, Cygwin got rid of some oddities in environment handling after this fruitful discussion. (Read more at "Perl on Cygwin".)
The new thread
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00283.html
The bug count at the beginning of this week was 1519. An instant overview of the open tickets can be seen at any time in the rt.perl.org link below.
RT in Oct 10 13:00, courtesy of Robert Spier
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00257.html
Perl RT just now
http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
Odd Behavior in Closures In RT ticket #37396, Mathieu observed some weird problems with lexical bindings while mixing blocks, named subroutines and closures. Dave Mitchell remembered these issues had been fixed in the development branch of perl, which will eventually appear in the stable release 5.10. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes sketched some workarounds to prevent the problems.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00207.html
Faster ++/-- for Integers Postfix ++/-- in void contexts are optimized to prefix ++/--, because the later is known to be faster. Hugo van der Sanden posted a patch to extend the special treatment even for integers, where the same rationale is also valid.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00457.html
Indexing perl Docs Carrying on with the plan to index the most of perl POD files, Ivan Tubert-Brohman, with contributions by Simon Taylor, sent a patch adding index entries to a number of Perl documents (like perldata, perlfunc, and so on). A total of new 1999 index entries applied to blead.
Ivan's calling summarized
http://dev.perl.org/perl5/list-summaries/2005/20050915.html#Pod_Indexing_Project_Status_and_Plan
Ivan and the 1999 new entries
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00368.html
Array Indexing with a Ref Bug #37427 was open by "daniel_lo" to report that the incorrect indexing of an array with a reference
perl -e '$a=1; print $stack->[\$a]->[0];'
would produce an "Out of memory" error. Rick Delaney noticed there is a warning for this if he had tried with -w. Dave Mitchel dismissed the bug: a ref in numeric context gives the address of the referent. So the code may be actually trying to create an extremely large array.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00397.html
Using the DOR Last week had seen a thread on the subject of whether symbol tables %...:: should be expected to be defined or not (as summarized). David Nicol persisted on his suggestion to recognize if(defined) and parse that to a construction involving the brand new operator op_DOR, which could arguably be a concise solution. However cool, David got warnocked.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00254.html
To Awk or Not To Awk Xavier Noria posted a doc patch for an improved explanation of $, and $\. Michael Schwern went further with Xavier's approach to not add references to awk, suggesting these awk jargons should be dumped entirely, as folks usually do not read perl documentation anymore to know how emulate awk behavior.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00471.html
%INC and Forward Slashes Jan Dubois brought in a patch to make sure the keys in %INC always use forward slashes. That fixed those ugly "subroutine foo redefined" warnings on Windows. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes had some questions whether that works in old perls on classic Mac OS, for which Jan Dubois thinks the general answer is yes. As a contumacious Windows user, I salute Jan Dubois for leaving Win32 free of those (dozens of) annoying warnings each time cpan is run.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2005-10/msg00504.html
This summary was written by Adriano Ferreira. Fortunately, shorter than the last one he wrote.
Information concerning bugs referenced in this summary (as #nnnnn) may be viewed at http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=nnnnn
Information concerning patches to maint or blead referenced in this summary (as #nnnnn) may be viewed at http://public.activestate.com/cgi-bin/perlbrowse?patch=nnnnn
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