This week, besides some bug reports involving UTF8 locales, the porters discussed a wide range of subjects, from Mathematics to English, not forgetting about some old Unix thingies, such as system calls and termcaps.
Kevin Moore reported bug #18874 : sometimes, with perl 5.8.0, the $&
variable is not correctly aliased to $MATCH. Andreas Koenig's little
gnomes quickly identified the patch that introduced this regression, and
it was reverted, with a proper regression test added. The root cause of
the bug is apparently that aliasing variables (via *MATCH = \$&)
doesn't work as well with magic than aliasing globs (*MATCH = *&).
In other words, it's a can of worms.
Tels was busy this week on the Math::Big* modules. He fixed several bugs, and apparently his fixes led to performance improvements. I won't summarize Tels' eloquent missive, so here it is : Tels' eloquent missive
He also worked on the square root and nth root functions. Nobody commented on his work, but I think that's because (1) these modules are scary, (2) mathematics are scary, (3) quoting Tels, the deeper you dig, the more sh*t you find.
Alan Burlison found
that getservbyport(), unlike getservbyname(), doesn't
accept an empty string as its second argument (the protocol). This is not
consistent (and not consistent with the getservent(3) manpage.) Slaven
Rezic provided a fix.
After some discussion on the causes of bug #18717, Rafael Garcia-Suarez
put in minor change in the set of characters that are considered to be
safe
in $ENV{TERM} regarding the tainting mechanism. Now, if you run perl
with -T, and if your terminal name contains a character which is
non-alphanumeric and not in [-_.+], perl will consider $ENV{TERM}
tainted.
UTF8-locale-related bugs continue to flood the porters. Wilbur Goltermann
reported bug #18857, about a s/// substitution that fails with a
coredump, under a UTF8 locale. Vilem Marsik reported a bug in the perl
debugger (#18915) that appears to be related to a capturing regexp that
doesn't like UTF8. Bug #18931, reported by Bhavesh Davda, is about a
\U...\E expression not behaving correctly, also under an UFT8 locale.
It seems to be related as well to regular expressions. Last but not least,
warnings reported by perl are not UTF8-aware (bug-#5956-revival).
Ken Williams is working on converting xsubpp (the part of MakeMaker that preprocesses XS files to C code) into a module, for which he proposed the name ExtUtils::ParseXS. He explains : The reason I'm doing this is so that the functionality can be used in other contexts, other platforms, and other build environments like Module::Build. Brian Ingerson found the idea interesting for Inline::C.
Hugo van der Sanden integrated into the core the new version of perldoc (and the relevant Pod::Perldoc::* modules), by Sean M. Burke. (This new perldoc is also available from the CPAN.)
Nicholas Clark fixed the bug (#18651) reported last week, pertaining to restricted hashes.
Rafael fixed three obscure memory corruption bugs in the lexer, and apparently found some other ones.
This summary brought to you by Rafael Garcia-Suarez, both on http://use.perl.org/ and via a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org . Comments and corrections are, as always, welcome.
