I finally found time to produce a new instance of this weekly selection. Read about Unicode chars in POD, an incompatible change in a widely (and wisely) used module, a couple of new proposals, and a smaller than usual amount of bugs.
A thread was spawned from the B::Lint patch proposed by Ian Phillipps last
week. It's about non-ASCII
chars in PODs (for example, ï).
Apparently, some versions of nroff(1) are offended by characters with an
ASCII code > 127, and pod2man should generate portable manpages
(although Russ Allbery said that he was considering a way to add an option
to pod2man to generate groff-specific manpages). Sean M. Burke
suggested to use the Pod::Escapes module to get rid of escape sequences
that can't be handled in the output format, and added some insight about
what the POD specification says on Unicode input.
Michael G. Schwern released a new alpha version of
Test::Simple/More/Builder. An important change is that threads.pm is no
longer automatically loaded on an ithread-enabled perl. Hence it will be
necessary to use thread before loading Test::More or Test::Builder
to run tests that use threads.
Salvador Fandino send an impressive patch to add assertion
support to
Perl. Briefly, a new sub attribute assertion is used to mark subs as
assertions, and those assertions are enabled via a new command-line
switch, -A. Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes found that it's a great idea. The
pumpking hasn't commented on this yet.
Brian Ingerson posted an announcement of his CPAN::MakeMaker module on P5P last month, and didn't receive any comments until this week, probably because the implications of this awesome hack are difficult to figure out at first sight.
CPAN::MakeMaker is a replacement for ExtUtils::MakeMaker. It's also self-distributing : it's part of the MakeMaker-generated tarball, hence doesn't need to be installed on the users' systems -- in fact it gets never installed on the users' systems.
Andreas Koenig apparently found a bug in version.pm. Basically he
states that
use version;
$v = version->new(5.00563);
print $v->numify;
should print "5.00563", and not "5.005063", since it should be equivalent to 5.5.630, and not to 5.5.63. The correct interpretation of the relevant chapter and verse of perl56delta are required to define the proper behavior.
Sean M. Burke announced a shinier, refactored, and generally
refunkified version of the perldoc utility, available from CPAN if you
want to test it. It's of course aimed at replacing the current perldoc.
Bug #18306 shows that B::Xref sometimes reports random file names with a threaded perl. Apparently the problem comes from the perl core, not from B::Xref.
Dave Mitchell sent a patch to add more information to the infamous error
message Scalars leaked, by printing the adresses of the leaked scalars.
It's enabled by the new preprocessor symbol DEBUG_LEAKING_SCALARS.
H.Merijn Brand still chases Cygwin bugs through a deep smoke screen.
This summary brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. If you prefer a text/plain interface, it's also available via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org . Comments and corrections are, as always, welcome.