Last week our Perl pumpking Jarkko Hietaniemi posted his perl 5.8.0 to-do list on perl5-porters. He writes, "The bad news is that it seems that the things on what I consider to be a todo list are relatively hard. The good news is that the list is not too long."
Included on the list are outstanding issues with PerlIO/threading/multiplicity issues, MakeMaker passthru, attributes, Unicode, and the FAQ.
He might even buy you a beer. Maybe.
A couple of the items in the original list have already been ticked off re Unicode: the mktables rewrite has been done, and the long (\p{IsUppercaseLetter}) alternatives (\p{Lu}) for general properties are done.
NI-S started pounding on the PerlIO issues.
The MakeMaker PASTHRU experiment has been reverted to its earlier state because of too much breakage with CPAN modules. (A workaround for what Alan Burlison wanted has been left in.)
Damian is hard at work figuring out what to do with the sub-working sub-attributes.
A memory leak with eval "sub{}" has been identified; Sarathy is tracking it down.
Couple of mysterious failures (optimizer bugs? library bugs?), on e.g. Cygwin and UTS, have cropped up. It would be nice to get rid of them.
Though new failures are disheartening we want more of them (how's that for masochism?) Do you have an exotic (non-Intel non-Linux non-Solaris non-Win32) platform? Have you tried out the latest bleadperl* in there?
More than one thousand open bugs at bugs.perl.org. We still need more "bugwalkers" checking whether the problems still are valid.
Is your (least) favourite bug fixed in the latest bleadperl? If not, now is the time to complain loudly.
The p5p FAQ tells you how to report bugs and how to get the latest bleadperl*.
* bleadperl is the bleeding edge developer release of Perl, in case you are not a p5p regular.
