"Insistent rumors claim that we used to have Perl compilable with C++ -- I doubt it a bit, given the kind of problems I found when doing this latest cleanup work." -- Jarkko Hietaniemi, having now found a new wall against which to bang his head.
Rafael Garcia-Suarez posted the first draft of the delta that explained all the new goodies in the latest development release of Perl, 5.9.4.
perl594delta http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00254.html
He made a number of changes based on feedback received.
perl594delta (take two) http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00293.html
And after a second round of feedback, managed to push the tarball out the hatch.
Perl 5.9.4 is out http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00315.html
PERL_NO_DEV_RANDOM on WindowsAlex Davies noticed that perl attempts to look for /dev/urandom on Win32 platforms, even though that file does not exist. And worse, you can create it, thereby subverting Perl's randomness. Steve Peters fixed that up.
Have you in fact got any cheese here at all? http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00087.html
Jarkko Hietaniemi wrapped up his heroic endeavour to merge the code changes that IBM programmers made to a copy of Perl, circa 5.8.7, to blead. He announced he was stepping down, having left a couple of parts of the patch unapplied, and explained why. He invited the IBM programmers to continue the good work, to have Perl running on z/OS.
I hear the roar of a big machine http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00199.html
[] and {}Nicholas Clark discovered that a lot of work (lots of ops) are needed to build a single lousy anonymous hash or array, and wondered if there wasn't a more efficient way of of making one. He came up with a patch to change the behaviour (bonus JFDI points to Nicholas) that simultaneously slimmed down the op-tree, and doesn't break the test suite. And naturally enough, he wanted to know whether people thought this was a good idea.
Jim Cromie ran a few benchmarks and found some measurable improvements.
Special ops http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00394.html
Dropping in from Parrot, Chip Salzenberg wanted to know if any porters knew of a platform far, far away that did not have a C99-capable compiler.
Nicholas Clark mentioned gcc, for starters. Andy Dougherty had some good advice. Tony Cook pointed out that Microsoft don't seem very interested in providing support for C99 features, unless they happen to also be C++-compatible. Chip said some naughty words.
Just about everywhere else http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00427.html
Jesse Vincent announced the end of the Ponie project, the migration of the Perl 5 core to use the Parrot VM. A number of other techniques are currently under development to have Perl 5 code running inside Perl 6, and much good came out of the project in terms of clean-ups to the code base.
They shoot horses, don't they? http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00491.html
Numerous small patches that were applied quietly without fuss, or withdrawn by the author are not included in this section (it's big enough as it is).
Jarkko Hietaniemi checked in a large body of work to make the code base compile with g++, the GNU C++ compiler.
First some g++ goodness for Tru64
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00076.html
And then a large patch for everyone, which nearly almost works, but significant smoking will be required, if only to get the kinks ironed out on some of the more common platforms.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00093.html
At this point, Jarkko rolled up a patch that succeeded as getting as far as completing make perl, although x2p and a few extensions don't build. Steve Peters carried the baton and tidied up a few of the easier modules, although a couple needed more thought.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00154.html
Jarkko then puzzled for a bit over how to get C linkage back out again at the end of it, so that things would work as before. All this fuss made him suspect that the source probably never was compilable with a C++ compiler. Still, it might in the near future.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00225.html
He even managed to make x2p work.
doubleplusgood http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00422.html
Gabor Szabo delivered some patches to add X<> tags (for indexing) to the core documentation and also snuck in a few stylistic changes while no-one was looking (although it warranted a comment from Rafael).
File::Spec http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00111.html File::Basename http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00112.html perlvar http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00119.html
perlhackJarkko jotted down some more nuggets of wisdom acquired over the years of doing battle with unfriendly compilers.
Here be dragons http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00239.html
Robin Barker sent in a patch to silence many warnings of signed/unsigned mismatches. Hooray! Applied.
ttys everywhere rejoiced http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00495.html
ConfigureMichael Cummings, from Gentoo, proposed a patch to make Configure smarter about /dev/null, which may not always be configured correctly, especially in chrooted environments, and by the time this causes a problem, the build may already be quite some way down the track (and thus the original cause of the error may be hard to diagnose. "Missing Separator" errors may not seem crystal clear. Alexey Toptygin proposed a tweak. A new patch was proposed. Unapplied.
Go directly to jail http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00515.html
Things in lib/strict.t, lib/subs.t and t/run/fresh_perl.t seemed to be going pear-shaped, but appeared to be a Heisenbug, since Jarkko wasn't able to reproduce the errors manually.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00327.html
The pain persisted, so in the morning, Jarkko went to the ice-rink to see if Dave Mitchell was around. Nicholas Clark made the connection to the work on plugging leaks on unevaluable code, realising that that may be causing problems here. Dave professed to not having many tuits at the moment.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00379.html
*FILE{IO} does not behave like *FILE for stat() and -X() operators (#8244)Andy Dougherty revived an old bug that rose to the surface after a Coverity scan. Rafael applied a quick fix.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00200.html
Safe compartments (#39887)Rafael asked for some test cases to draw the bug out into the open, where it may more easily be stamped out.
Here buggy buggy http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00170.html
B::Deparse double do (#40055)Nicholas Clark wondered why do{} was deparsed as do[ do{} }. Rick Delaney provided the fix.
Deep do do http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00081.html
Apparently not so much a bug as an unsupported feature.
It's always done that http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00098.html
Perl_newPMOP() under USE_ITHREADS (#40077)A discussion at Perlmonks revealed a ref-counting memory leak. No takers.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00105.html
perlfaq6 example is wrong: pull out lines between two patterns (#40084)Max Maischein saw a flaw in a perlfaq example (where the two patterns appear on different lines). The only fix he could think of involved the arcane m??. Rick Delaney offered a suggestion.
This question frequently asked? http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00117.html
Data::Dumper with Sortkeys performs incomplete hash traversal (#40088)Peter S. Shenkin provided a short snippet showing how a hash would be not be completely traversed when the Sortkeys setting was active (but the example was using each too). And it appears fixed in 5.8.8 anyway.
ENOTABUG, I assume http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00116.html
G. Paulissen explained why this should be so. No takers.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00142.html
Ben Tilly suggested that a warning should be issued if a module is specified with incorrect capitalisation (on a filesystem with case-insensitive semantics), reasoning that while use Strict might work Here, it certainly won't work There.
Rafael noted that it turns out that there used to be such a warning, but it was removed because of false positives.
Can't please everyone, all the time http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00178.html
Steve Hay awarded Subba Valisetty a golden crown for have filed the most utterly useless bug report ever[TM]. Nicholas Clark was gentler, and offered a pointer to a tutorial on how to file good bug reports.
Gong! http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00181.html
Pierre posted an excerpt of a failing compilation (pp_sys.c dying an agonising death). Steve Hay asked for the output of the myconfig script.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00202.html
warnings::warnif is sometimes ignored (#40144)Wiles showed how to make warnings::warnif misbehave. No takers.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00203.html
make fails for perl 5.8.8 build on AIX5.3 (#40155)Graham Stokes was having compiling 5.8.8 for AIX 5.3. Fortunately, he was smart enough to supply myconfig. Steve Hay suggested using ld (linker) from the GNU binutils package, rather than AIX's ld. Andy Dougherty also provided some advice on fixing locale warnings.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00333.html
ccversion fix for HP/UX (#40161)An anonymous porter, possibly using the HP testdrive facility, filed a fix for the HP/UX hints file. Applied.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00329.html
join()ing threads (#40168)Jonathan Geisler had a problem with threads, that Jerry D. Hedden thought was probably fixed in the latest versions of threads available on CPAN, and made a couple of suggestions to the code as posted. Johnathon thanked him for the courtesy, and pointed out that one of the snippets in question was lifted directly from perlthrtut.
So that's the bug http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00330.html
DProf with threads (#40170)Jonathan also joined the long list of people who had found limitations with Devel::DProf in its current incarnation. Any takers?
A call to tuits http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00332.html
Solaris: BEGIN and exec, fork, system or open(|-,-|) (#40190)
Gary Vollink discovered some Solaris wackiness, involving use warnings FATAL => 'all', systems and/or backticks failing, and code blocks then being evaluated and executed twice (when once would be ample).
Nicholas Clark remembered this emergent behaviour cropping up in other contexts, and thought that it was something to do with the Unix file descriptor being diddled in the parent when the child dies.
Solaris: you are awful, but I like you http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00343.html
grep autovivifies hash elements (#40194)Marc Lehmann wondered why grepping a value against a hash key causes the hash key to spring into existence. David Nicol thought that Marc should have been using exists. chromatic supplied a much clearer pair of snippets to show what Marc was trying to get at. And yes, it's quite counter-intuitive, broken, and nearly impossible to fix. David still had trouble understanding, and Benjamin Carter (who writes from a domain with a most excellent name) explained in more detail about aliasing of $_ and the creation or not of hash keys.
Weird science http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00358.html
perlxstut man page (#40197)Ville Koskinen explained the difference between ensure and insure. Applied.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00363.html
Ian Goodacre had a problem with regular expressions trying to match characters coming out of a UTF-16-encoded file, specifically, an unrecognised BOM 7061. No takers.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00381.html
<> as glob in scalar context and interpolated variables (#40213)Dakkar filed a report about using <> as a glob in scalar context and interpolated variables and how iterators were not reset and even added a test case. No takers. Perhaps the fact that the test was tarred and bzipped scared away potential fixers.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00467.html
SelfLoader::croak doesn't protect $@ from being clobbered by require (#40216)Bo Lindbergh filed a bug report so clear that Adriano Ferreira felt that he could fix it. So he did. Applied.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00471.html
Jerry D. Hedden discovered a problem with use warnings 'reserved' not working correctly. Rafael made an oblique explanation as to why, but I was not able to determine whether he was pointing out that the error was in Jerry's test case or in Perl.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00490.html
They both seemed to understand each other, for an additional patch later on got things sorted out.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00527.html
Lucas Holt tweaked the FreeBSD hints file, to derive a new hints file that allows perl 5.8.8 to build successfully on MidnightBSD. Unapplied.
Another platform added to the roster http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00531.html
PerlIO::scalar doesn't know how to truncate (#40241)Bo Lindbergh wanted truncate to work on strings. Rafael looked at the implementation and saw that it only works for file handles at the moment. Any takers?
Your chance for fame and glory http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00536.html
Math::BigInt silently drops lib argument if not available (#40242)You can import Math::Bigint and tell it to use an underlying library to do the biginty calculations. But if you type the name incorrectly, it silently loads a couple of default libraries and never complains that anything is wrong. Andreas König thought this behaviour less than desirable. He felt that the script should die, so that the programmer could fix the error.
The problem is that if this was changed now, it might break programs of people who were living happily in ignorance that their BigInt calculations were not in fact using GMP or Pari as they had thought, but rather the default Calc and Fastcalc libraries, simply because they had accidently typed "Gimp" or "Paris".
Allen Smith felt that since this was the first time in four years that someone had questioned the existing behaviour, it maybe wasn't so bad after all. Tels offered a snippet of sanity checking boilerplate to do what Andreas wanted.
You might find you get what you need http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00537.html
Andreas also posted a bug on rampant memory usage, that can be slimmed down by using temporaries, which in turn allows the garbage collector to fire off more readily, keeping consumption to a minimum.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00538.html
Around 21 new tickets were created this month, and alas, only 8 were closed, bringing the current total to 1519. Hopefully after the summer lull Steve will be able to get that figure down under 1500 again. And if a couple of people pitched in to help, we could bring it down lower, and faster.
Over to you http://rt.perl.org/rt3/NoAuth/perl5/Overview.html
version to correct the problem that Ovid spotted of version 0.000001 not being understood.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00172.html
blead with Time::Local version 1.13 from CPAN.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00184.html
Module::Load became part of the core distribution.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00187.html
Package::Constants also became part of the core distribution.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00244.html
Locale::Maketext::Simple to the core, however, as far as I can see, it was not added. The fact that the module is not licensed under the Artistic or GPL licenses (rather, the MIT license), may have something to do with it.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00251.html
Module::Loaded also made it into the core, but sparked off a certain amount of debate as to whether it offered enough functionality.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00258.html
Time::HiRes version 1.88 to CPAN.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00463.html
Rich Rauenzahn suggested a tweak to determining the HP-UX compiler version in the Policy file.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00088.html
Nicholas Clark posted a long reply about the difference between Python's and Perl's threads, and why Perl's threads are unlikely to mesh nicely with a CORBA implementation.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00120.html
Brendan O'Dea, from the world of debian, wondered whether what was wrong with setlocale() was an implementation or a documentation problem.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00213.html
Alexandre Jousset wrote in to explain how to cross compile Perl for the TomTom GO 910. Rafael updated a config file to take account of the information.
Is that a telephone or an MP3 player? http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00214.html
Even though he's left us, we are not forgotten. Andy Lester CC'ed the list on his essay about why consting is good.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00245.html
Ben Morrow suggested adding all keywords to perlfunc. And rather just moaning about how nice it would be, actually sent in the patch that documented a slew of things, like can, DESTROY and so forth. Unapplied, but it has certain merits.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00246.html
Marc Lehmann uncovered a way to make perl with -DPERL_DONT_CREATE_GVSV dump core. Nicholas wasn't sure of the reason.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00444.html
Gerard Goossen came up with a test case for a substr with lvalue refcount increment bug, but no-one was sure what to do about it. At least, Dave Mitchell didn't know.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-08/msg00502.html
This summary was written by David Landgren.
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