This Week on perl5-porters - 22-28 May 2006

This Week on perl5-porters - 22-28 May 2006

This isn't supposed to happen, obviously. It's unusual for Configure to pick up libraries that it can't, in fact, use. -- Andy Dougherty, commenting bug #39195

Topics of Interest

Scalar::Util::weaken, to have or have not

There was further discussion of the XS version of Scalar::Util and the fact that it offers a weaken function which is vital to avoid resource leaks when freeing self-referential structures. (Specifically, it offers a method from Perl-space to intervene directly on the underlying mechanism used for managing garbage collection).

  There were five philosophers at a table
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00801.html

Adam Kennedy proposed Task::Weaken as an elegant way (insofar as a wart may be considered elegant) of dealing with the problem of trying to create a dependency on the particular Scalar::Util version that happens to contain the weaken routine.

  Not the other one
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00878.html

Following up on thread safety issues and opcode hints

Last month, Nicholas Clark discovered some obscure bugs that could lead to race problems, with critical memory accesses not protected by mutexes, or memory allocations going astray. He managed to sort out a number of problems, and reported that there were a number of issues that would need to be addressed.

  The fearsome five
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00770.html

Regular expression engine improvements

Yves Orton ran a post-mortem on his recent work to convert /[c]/ to /c/, and realised that a lot of the difficulty can be traced back to the memory allocation strategy used. By its very nature, the strategy rules out a number of interesting optimisation possibilities, because a regexp is built with a two-pass compilation, and during the second pass, too much information has already been discarded, so at that point it is already too late to be able to consider a certain number of transforms.

Save more information up front, and then you stand a better chance of being able to apply some useful optimisations to the resulting opcodes. Hugo van der Sanden wondered whether it would be possible to produce an opcode stream that would be amenable to processing by the existing peephole optimiser.

Yves wanted to push a lot of the smarts from study_chunk and regtail into the parse phase. And wrapped up with a patch to tidy the debug output somewhat, and improve the trie code.

  Gentlemen, study your engine
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00781.html

Andy Lester wanted to add some consting goodness to regcomp.c and regexec.c, which would have caused Yves considerable pain, since he was in the middle of some deep core hackery, and didn't want to face the nightmare of a three-way diff.

  Not now
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00928.html

After that, Yves delivered a verily impressive patch of new, shiny goodness to the regexp engine. And if that wasn't enough, he also took Andy's own consting work and folded that in as well. After a bit of adjustment due to other patches going into blead at the same time, Rafael managed to get everything in place and running nicely.

  Right now
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00934.html

A tutorial on Unicode

Juerd Waalboer wrote a very nice tutorial to help people get started with Unicode. A number of people contributed ideas and suggestions. Juerd sifted through these and produced a second version. As we went to press, inclusion in the core was pending.

  Unicode decoded
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00919.html

sprintf and tainted format strings

Dave Mitchell revisited the sprintf('%n') issue that made the headlines back in December, and thought that it might be wise to apply taint checks to the format string (the first argument to sprintf, proposed a relaxed or strict interpretation to what tainting would imply and asked for opinions on the matter.

Andy Lester favoured the strict approach (any use of a tainted format string fails), but recalled that the idea had been dismissed rapidly when put forward during the previous discussions. Steve Peters thought that it was more a case of being set aside than anything else, and expressed surprise at the fact that format strings do not already have taint checking.

Rick Delaney wondered what exactly did Steve and Dave mean, and put forward a couple of snippets to see if he understood the issues.

  Just when you thought it was safe
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00917.html

Shooting yourself in the foot with overloading

Jarkko Hietaniemi was led astray by a somewhat unhelpful Use of uninitialized value in hash element warning caused by overloading, and wondered if a better message could be generated if overloading was involved.

While not directly answering Jarkko's question, Joshua ben Jore mentioned that even more overloading fun can be had when using Devel::Cover, since applying defined to an object will trigger stringification there, but not during normal execution. Paul Johnson was most surprised to hear this, and asked for a test case. David Landgren provided a small example that exposes the problem.

Yves Orton confirmed that he had run into this problem when developing Data::Dump::Streamer, and had had to jump through considerable hoops to work around it.

  Gun, meet foot
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00805.html

Patches of Interest

Test infrastructure improvements

Yves Orton noticed a problem due a recent tweak to Test::Harness, and fixed it so as to stop harness from printing the summary table header for each row. Which does, it should be agreed, get tedious after a while.

  No more excessive scrolling
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00789.html

At about the same, Andy Lester changed t/TEST to queue up the names of the tests that fail, to dump them at the end of the run. This means one gets all the failing tests in one convenient chunk.

  No more scrolling back
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00802.html

More goodness from Andy

In his ongoing quest to const, Andy Lester sent in some refactoring for av.c, which crushed some incorrect uses of SvREFCNT_inc, removed unnecessary temporary variables and brought the usual suspects into line.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00806.html

And a parameter to Perl_magic_existspack in mg.c that could be made const.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00937.html

And a similar treatment for Perl_gv_check in gv.c.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00938.html

Pod::Html should not convert "foo" to ``foo''

Gisle Aas hated this mis-feature, since most modern fonts produce a spectacularly ugly result. After a bit of a detour into the realm of troff, it was decided to just use plain double-quotes instead.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00836.html

Relaxing the tests in Dynaloader.t

Jarkko found that Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni's tests in Dynaloader.t were too platform-specific to be useful. After a bit of discussion it was decided to loosen up the test which attempted to trap the message generated when the loading of a non-existent shared library is attempted.

  Eggs, bacon, sausage and spam
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00892.html

New and old bugs from RT

Memory leak from eval "sub { \$foo = 22 " (#37231)

This used to leak memory (that is, trying to eval a broken subroutine definition). Dave Mitchell made it leak less. And then after sitting back and looking at his handiwork, Dave made completely water-proof. Nicholas Clark still managed to poke a hole in it. Unruffled, Dave countered with a King's Gambit that appeared to keep any remaining errant allocations in cast-iron casing.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00885.html

IPC::Open2::open2 failures (#39127)

Dave Mitchell had a look at the source code, and noted that there was a race condition depending on whether the child dies before or after the parent tries to write to it. Furthermore, there is no easy way to fix the problem as is, which is why IPC::Run may be a better alternative all round. Dave suggested a documentation patch to clarify the situation.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00420.html

IO::Socket::connect returns wrong errno on timeout (#39178)

"mlelstv" showed some discrepancies in error messages depending on whether it was the first or subsequent time that a socket connection failed, and traced it down to a $! not being cleared before a system call.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00731.html

Optimizer bug in qr// flags (#39185)

"johnpc" reported a bug in patterns using qr// flags. Dave Mitchell reported that this had been fixed in blead, but not yet backported to the maintenance branch.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00769.html

CPAN configuration stuck at Select your continent (#39186)

Mark-Jason Dominus was in the middle of configuring his CPAN client when things started to go horribly wrong. Andreas Koenig wanted to have a look at Mark's MIRRORED.BY file. Mark took one look at the file and saw that it was corrupt (well, empty), and therefore knew what to do.

  Delete and start over
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00776.html

perlfunc on reverse in scalar context (#39187)

Ted Pride had never noticed that reverse also works on scalars:

  my $rev = reverse('forward'); # $rev contains drawrof

mainly because the documentation is slightly too clever for its own good.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00797.html

Error Report (#39195)

Sriram Madduri had configured a perl build, but at link-time the build failed with some unknown libraries that Configure had specified. Andy Dougherty spotted what he thought was the cause of the problem, but we didn't hear back from Sriram, so we don't know if it's fixed.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00819.html

File::BOM hangs during test (#39211)

Redirected to the module author. File::BOM isn't core.

  y otras chicas del montón
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00864.html

Null pattern causing expected behaviour (#39212)

If it's causing the expected behaviour...

  it's not a bug
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00865.html

Optimiser doesn't constant fold $] or $^V (#39214)

Benjamin Smith wished that $] or $^V were constant-folded. This could be useful, because then one could include sections of code for specific versions of Perl that would be optimised away at compile time if not applicable. Unfortunately, since these variables are, well, variable, and not constant (in other words, you may assign to them), this isn't going to work.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00887.html

Pod::HTML should use &entities; for quotes (#39215)

Johan Vromans thought that this would be a nice idea. Gisle Aas explained why it might be a bad idea, and that in any event, Pod::HTML had been tweaked to no longer emit the pugly `` and '' blots.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00869.html

Compiling With nmake (#39226)

William C. Smith wanted to compile Perl with nmake. Yves showed him how to do just that.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00918.html

Perl5 Bug Summary

The previous week's bug summary, omitted from the previous summary (oops):

  7 created + 12 closed = 1507
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00497.html

And this week:

  8 created and 22 (!) closed = 1493
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00743.html

Hey! we broke through the 1500 barrier!

  Now, with added shinyness
  http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html

New Core Modules

In Brief

Marcus Holland-Moritz documented and completed a few holes in the orthogonality of literal string macros, mainly as a service to XS developers. Applied.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00738.html

Anno Siegel had some difficulties adding a core module because it was building man pages when it was not supposed to. Rafael provided the necessary MakeMaker magic to make it do the right thing at the right time.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00739.html

Andy Lester's second refactoring of pp_sys.c from last week went in as change #28279.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00697.html

Alberto Simões thought that the problem of regexp slowness with $' and $` could be solved elegantly by making them lexical. Dave Mitchell demonstrated why this was not possible (existing code would break).

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00729.html

Torsten Foertsch wanted to know how to trap a warning generated at global destruction time. The test infrastructure doesn't appear up to the task, because at global destruct time, all the tests have long since finished. chromatic recommended running the test in a child, and examining its output.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00735.html

perlhack.pod was confused about POPSTACK, so Dave Mitchell and Jan Dubois tightened the documentation. Deep core hackers rejoiced.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00791.html

Dave also improved the -Dpv parser debugging output.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00890.html

Philip M. Gollucci was having trouble with Perl_croak and nullch at patch level 27529.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00816.html

Jarkko noticed that there are no execute bits on semaphores on Mac OS/X, and tweaked the documentation to clarify the situation.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00852.html

Alex Davies cooked up a patch to shrink the object size for pp_sys.c, but as the savings came at the cost of code legibility, with no apparent run-time benefit, Rafael chose to decline it.

  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00936.html

About this summary

This summary was written by David Landgren. Yes, late enough to be next week's summary. Sorry, this week I have been dealing with assorted crises.

Last week's summary attracted a response from Dave Nicol, who explained his linked list master plan in more detail.

  Action stations
  http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-05/msg00860.html

If you want a bookmarklet approach to viewing bugs and change reports, there are a couple of bookmarklets that you might find useful on my page of Perl stuff:

  http://www.landgren.net/perl/

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.

If you found this summary useful, please consider contributing to the Perl Foundation to help support the development of Perl.

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