Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes suggested that Yves Orton send in a patch to pull out some of the ancillary functions in Data::Dump::Streamer in order to make them available in the core distribution.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00579.html
So Yves did just that. The first addition is to add reftype_name(), that behaves like reftype except that it returns false rather than undef on non-references. This removes the need for fussy make-work code on the client side to avoid warnings.
The second addition is a regex() function, which makes it easier to deal with patterns, whether they have been blessed into other namespaces or not.
Graham Barr admitted that the return value of reftype() was a mistake, and reftype_name() was acceptable, but felt that the regex() function was better off in the Regexp module.
Yves didn't like the fact that Scalar::Util::reftype returns SCALAR instead of something like REGEX. Nick Ing-Simmons liked the idea, but thought that it was too dangerous for maint.
Another sub-thread in the discussion revolved around whether a qr// thing is an object or a type. It is, in fact, an object, but Yves argued that it is much more useful to treat it as a type. Graham agreed to disagree.
Adam Kennedy admitted to using Regexps as objects quite a bit and would be happy to see the Regexp module receive a dose of spring-cleaning (which I suppose means fixing up the reblessing inconsistency that Yves was getting at).
Another hassle Yves pointed out was the non-reversibility of stringifying regexps:
my $qr=qr/foo/; my $str="$qr"; print qr/$str/; # equivalent but not equal
Dave Mitchell pointed out that a regular expression currently is a scalar, it just happens to have a bit of magic attached...
Shouldering the weight of history http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00703.html
Hugo van der Sanden returned to the super-linear cache bug (a || logical or instead of a | bitwise or) in the regular expression engine, and came up with a suitable test case:
("a" x 31) =~ /^(a*?)(?!(a{6}|a{5})*$)/;
print length($1);
This prompted Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes to come up with another bug that showed how blead broke existing behaviour. Since no-one should ever have come to rely on this behaviour, it was all quietly swept under the rug. Dave Mitchell hinted that he was working on New Stuff in the engine.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00587.html
threads into the third milleniumJerry D. Hedden continued to send patches to sync CPAN's threads with blead, first by removing a superfluous counter.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00577.html and again http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00674.html and reworked the threads destruct call http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00780.html
He vented his frustration at the slow pace with which the patches were getting applied, believing that he was playing by the rules as much as possible. Rafael was very apologetic, explaining that he understands so little about threads that he's barely qualified to apply them. And apart from Rafael, there aren't too many alternatives.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00753.html
blead RE improvements to maintNicholas Clark posted a proof-of-concept update to re.pm to deliver Dave Mitchell's iterative (as opposed to recursive) implementation of the regular expression to perl 5.8.1 and beyond. A few show-stoppers need to be cleaned up: some coredumps in the test suite need to be sorted out and some tweaks to ppport.h are needed. As a bonus, Yves Orton's trie work comes along for the ride.
More songs about building regexps http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00808.html
valgrind and Perl 5Nicholas Clark wondered what would happen, as in, how many bugs would be uncovered, if one were to run the test suite under valgrind. So Rafael Garcia-Suarez did just that, and discovered that 41 test files produce errors.
Nicholas and Rafael then set about fixing up the problems that were uncovered.
There's always something to do http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00622.html
Nicholas Clark looked at the unexpurgated version of the output from the test suite and noticed that six tests were marked as unexpectedly succeeding. In test parlance, these tests are called TODO tests, since they show what there is to do. This state of affairs is usually due to a test case that is expected to fail when run, since it exercised a bug in perl that needed to be fixed, and at some point, a source code change caused the failing test to succeed.
Nicholas saw that many of the really old regexp bugs that have been fixed, had no TODO tests, and in any event, the default, summarised, output of the test test suite makes no mention of them anyway, so it is not as if anyone would have noticed the improvement.
So firstly, the test harness had to be upgraded to report the summary of TODO tests that succeed, and (much more work) all the open bugs need test cases written for them, so that it becomes easier to see when they have been fixed.
Yves Orton hacked up his copy of Test::Harness to do this. Andy Lester took the idea and applied it to his development version of Test::Harness (see the "New Modules" section below).
Abe Timmerman updated the test smoke kit, in order to get all this new goodness into the hands of the smokers.
Much ado about todo http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00625.html Up in smoke rsync -avz source.test-smoke.org::ts-current .
After having read the traffic on p5p concerning the errors that Coverity uncovered, Alan Olsen what the possibilities were for having the tests extended to cover CPAN modules with XS components.
Johnathon Stowe realised that it was the output of xsubpp that needs to be tested, rather than the .xs files themselves, and wondered whether all the possible constructs it is possible to have xsubpp emit ere in fact being covered, and whether one ought to create a dummy XS module that simply causes xsubpp to emit everything it knows how to.
Tim Jenness thought that that issue should be covered by XS::Typemap. Johnathon did some quick coverage calculations and was surprised to learn that it wasn't too shabby.
Andy Lester volunteered to liaise with the Coverity people to have XS-based modules analysed, should the authors in question care to know the results. Randy W. Sims was concerned that some authors might think of it as a ratings system. Be that as it may, a couple of authors asked for analysis to be applied to their modules.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00633.html
This week, Andy Lester performed some more op_type shrinking in sv.c and dump.c,
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00717.html
and hauled some variables down into tighter scopes in util.c.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00719.html
Marcus Holland-Moritz grew tired of watching an endless list of warnings spew from compiling perl with a recent copy of gcc, so he patched things to get rid of the problems that gave rise to them.
Andy Lester was pleased to hear of the work, since it had been something of an annoyance for him too. He asked for a slightly less monolithic patch, so that different classes of errors could be fixed a bit at a time. Rafael eventually applied all the changes.
Understanding error messages http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00817.html
Nicholas Clark looked at a NetBSD smoke report, and wondered what it was that was being tested in ext/B/t/bytecode.t that was failing. Whatever it was, he fixed it with change #27874.
Smoke [5.9.4] 27855 FAIL(F) netbsd 3.0 (i386/1 cpu) http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00584.html
Steve Peters wondered why a test run was failing, simply because TEST was seeing test results being delivered out of order, where as harness didn't care.
Smoke [5.9.4] 27939 FAIL(F) MSWin32 WinXP/.Net SP2 (x86/2 cpu) http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00836.html
Steve Peters and Johnathon Stowe kicked this bug around, but as neither of them have access to the platform in question it shall have to remain open for the time being.
OpenServer anyone? http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00696.html
Rafael fixed this bug by accident while working on something else. No-one minded.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00591.html
In fact, Steve Peters continued his thankless task of trawling through old, open tickets and noticed that a certain number of bugs had been solved by changes committed recently and not so recently.
Fixed in previous millenium http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00600.html
Sys::Syslog) requires \0 terminator in syslog messages (#28019)Julian Mehnle called in from Debian-land to see what the status on this bug was, explaining that some comments or documentation would help avoid bugs being filed in the future.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00765.html
threads and require IO causes segmentation fault (#37076)Nicholas Clark jotted down a couple of notes on how to fix this problem.
Add it to the TODO http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00668.html
Steve Peters wondered why Dave's excellent example shouldn't be used to close this ticket.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00699.html
Text::ParseWords doesn't always handle backslashes correctly (#38904)John Vromans argued that the following equivalency was incorrect:
is_deeply([shellwords("aa bb cc\\ ")], ["aa", "bb", "cc "])
Alexey Toptygin delved into the code to find out why and offered a patch to make the behaviour a little more intuitive. Applied by Rafael.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00716.html
map sometimes uses only the last mapped value (#38935)Someone on Perlmonks posted an innocuous question about some strange behaviour with map, that turned out to be a caused by a change that was applied in 1998. People were surprised at that such a bug had remained unnoticed for so long.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00597.html The original thread http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=543989
Configure won't handle versions 5.10.0 or 5.8.10. (#38945)Andy Dougherty filed a bug on this problem so that people remember to do something about it in time.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00660.html
system 1 foo repeatedly (#38946)An interesting discussion arose from this report. It turns out that system 1, ... does something interesting under Windows.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00658.html
$TMP is not writable (#38947)Gabor Szabo noted that certain tests lib/Memoize/t/tie_ndbm.t fail if the directory pointed to by $TMP was not writable. He felt that a diagnostic should explain more clearly what the problem is rather than failing out of hand.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00659.html
Karuppiah Subramaniam has a migration problem. If you have any advice to offer, I'm sure it will be appreciated.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00758.html
exists error message on wrong argument type is incorrect (#38955)Jeremy Hetzler wished to clarify the error message received when exists use incorrectly, and bring it into line with the documentation.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00792.html
File::Find documentation - is "Don't modify these variables" still valid? (#38965)Steve Peters tweaked the documentation for File::Find to specify more clearly what happens to $_ in the callback routine.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00835.html
9 created and 4 closed = 1543 http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00590.html Steady as she goes http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00827.html
Nicholas Clark carried out his threat to document code references in @INC and source filters and also added a new feature at the same time.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00601.html
Paul Johnson read about the is_list_assignment speedup patch from Andy Lester, and pointed the porters to a two year old thread on a similar issue.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00693.html
Nick Ing-Simmons followed up on the issue of leaking file handles in XS code.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00689.html
Jan Dubois removed some cruft from makedef.pl
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00544.html
Jarkko Hietaniemi tried a patch to regcomp.c to see if it would silence an error from Coverity. It didn't. This led Jarkko to conclude that if Coverity was too clever, or too stupid, to figure out what was really happening, then maybe it's Red-flag-for-Refactoring time.
It would help us, frail humans http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00546.html
He then nailed another leak that Coverity found in doop.c.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00565.html
Nicholas Clark saw that Coverity dislikes PerlIO_findFILE. The logic seems a bit tortuous, so maybe that's not so surprising,
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00617.html
Nicholas looked at the last two unreviewed Coverity issues, in regexec.c and wondered whether Coverity was getting confused. Dave Mitchell explained that both issues were false positives.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00555.html
Alex Waugh provided the required information to support compiling perl on RISC OS.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00558.html
Andy Lester posted a short script to prune Jarkko's cpd output, to show more clearly where Cut-And-Paste code was happening in areas that interested him.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00560.html
Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes fixed building perl on Cygwin.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00561.html
Joshua Juran uploaded an experimental release of Lamp on SourceForge.
Lamp Ain't Mac POSIX http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00562.html
Andy Lester refactored the excessive use of PM_GETRE() in pp_ctl.c.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00564.html
Jan Dubois and Steve Hay coordinated the ActiveState changes to win32/Makefile in blead, clearing up an issue concerning 64-bit environments at the same time
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00567.html
Nicholas Clark explained what he understood Larry's MAD patch to be doing.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00575.html
The UTF-8 caching code that Nicholas Clark worked on a few months back wound up being exposed on the command-line via the -Ca switch.
Unless someone has a better idea http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00588.html
Nicholas Clark unearthed what is in hindsight a blindingly obvious memory leak on unthreaded builds between Perl_newCONSTSUB and cv_undef.
Nobody else knew what to do about it, either. http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00639.html
Andy Lester thought that GvUNIQUE() and its ilk could be removed from the source. Rafael commented that the macros had to remain, since at least Data::Alias on CPAN refer to them.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00654.html
Ashish Agarwal was having problems with weird characters displayed in the debugger. Joe McGuire thought it was probably one of the thirteen so-called variant characters in EBCDIC.
\ [ ] { } ^ ~ ! # | $ @ `
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00677.html
Andy Lester cleaned up regexec.c following on from the recent changes.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00692.html
Rick Delaney had discovered that fields.pm lost their compile-time benefit, dating back to when pseudo-hashes were removed from blead.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00771.html
Ken Williams asked for advice on some proposed File::Spec changes for VMS, John E. Malmberg supplied what information he could. Ken lamented how difficult it was to test VMS code if you didn't have access to a VMS box.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00823.html
Joshua ben Jore thought that the terribly cryptic select((select(OUTPUT_HANDLE), $| = 1)[0]) idiom should be banished from the documentation. Rafael bowed to reason.
Just because you can http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00766.html
The cynics scoffed at the effort expended to clear the Coverity issues, and Rafael pointed out that state variables are almost but not quite yet in blead.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-04/msg00707.html
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